Freelance and Full-time Employee Dilemma
Adjustments regarding how we work, where we work, with whom we work, why we work and the innovations we use in order to work are constantly changing. These considerations are escalating as the United Kingdom hopes to function normally in the following months and businesses try to reopen. Many of these changes began earlier in the pandemic, and were hastened as a result of it, and have now become integral parts of the business world. Two years into the pandemic, we have seen and experienced a lot of changes, and as we enter another year with COVID-19 still a continual and real threat, the economy must try to regain its strength.
Freelancing is not a new concept or fad that erupted during the pandemic. It has been around for decades. Due to the current economic climate right now, it is gaining huge popularity. This is partly due to many employees, once comfortable in their full-time jobs, that have been laid off and need to find work to support their families. It is also in part because people have built home offices, and are comfortable working at home, with their families, and have proven that they can be just as productive from home, as they are in the offices.
However, both employment arrangements have their fair share of pros and cons. According to the Boston Globe, this is from a Biz Journal article on a study done prior to actually the Covid-19 pandemic by Harvard Business School and Boston Consulting Group, 60 percent of employers foresee their corporate lineups to have reduced full-time staff, but the same fraction said they’d tend to rent from or share talent with other organisations. Hence, a full-time job seekers’ dilemma is finding such an option if they think freelancing is what most companies are using. Well with the volume of freelancers continually multiplying, it logically follows that businesses will inevitably be interested in them.
Yet, freelancers are also facing the dilemma from a different circumstance. Freelancing, with all of its uncertainty, such as no benefits and inconsistent income, has frequently become a matter of survival. The stability that had come with having strong ties to an institution for so many years has now died down.
Do we go full time? Do we look for multiple gigs? Do we work from home or look for an office based job? All these questions require deep consideration and companies to adapt to the changing patterns in the workforce today.
