The 6 Freelance Work Models For All Organizations

Originally Published on Forbes on November 3rd 2015, by Jacob Morgan

Whether you call them contingent workers, freelancers, 1099 workers, or anything else, it appears that organizations around the world are thinking of ways to tap into this new workforce. While the size of this group is still not known (reports vary quite a bit), all of the business leaders I have been speaking with are thinking of ways to spend more money and resources investing in this area. In fact, I have yet to meet a business leader at an organization that isn’t thinking of the freelancer economy and what it means to their respective organization. Right now there are perhaps more questions about the freelancer than there are answers.How can companies work with freelancers at scale? What impact will government rules and regulations have? How is this new breed of worker actually classified? What does this mean for full-time employment? How large is the freelancer economy? These are just a few of the things that I hear business leaders thinking about.
Regardless of how you chose to look at this space, it’s amazing that companies can now tap into top talent regardless of where they are in the world. What’s especially fascinating to me is how many large companies around the world are already working with freelancers, yet they don’t share that information with the public! Still, looking at various companies there appears to be a kind of segmentation that starts to emerge and I’m seeing organizations work with freelancers in one of six ways as depicted below.

1. All full-time employees
This is group is quite self-explanatory and consists of organizations that are yet to work with freelancers or contingent labor of any kind. These organizations still rely on the traditional full-time employee as a way to get work done. Yes, these companies still do exist.
2. Mostly full-time with freelancers as support
The natural first step for most organizations is to work with a few freelancers on mainly support driven activities such as writing, administrative work, perhaps some accounting and invoicing, cold-calling, email handling, and customer service. In most situations these are functions that aren’t core to how the business operates as seen in the second image above. Most companies start here because it’s easy, low risk, and doesn’t require much effort.
Oftentimes some employees at the organization are overwhelmed with work or the skills necessary to complete something are just in short supply which forces the organization to look outside. This scenario has proven to be effective for organizations of all shapes and sizes.
3. Mostly full-time with freelancers as core and support
Oftentimes (but not always) the organization starts to integrate freelancers into more core driven activities such as marketing programs, product development and management, sales leadership roles, and the like. I’m amazed at how many times I’ve corresponded with a senior level marketing person just to notice in their email signature or address that it says “contractor” or lists the agency they are a part of. What I have seen here is that employees see success with no.2 above and they say, “well it worked with support why don’t we try to get help with more crucial activities?” Eventually this starts to scale. This has also shown to be effective for every type of company.
4. Some full-time and some freelancers
There are many large organizations out there that actually have quite a large population of freelancers who work for them. Companies like IBM, Cisco, SAP, Pepsi, Google, HP, etc. hire tens or hundreds of thousands of freelancers oftentimes making up between 20-50% of the total workforce population. In these situations freelancers hold many support and core level functions ranging from catering an. For most large organizations around the world this is typical the “max” of how far they will go. In other words, I am not aware of any large global organizations that have a larger freelancer population than employee population (are you?). Again, this is relevant for every type of company out there.
5. Mostly full-freelancers and some full-time
This is something that I see much more common among smaller organizations or even some mid-size organizations. However large companies don’t “live here.” This model make sense for the smaller guys that are looking to work with talented people yet either don’t have the capital or don’t want to commit the capital towards a long-term engagement. It allows organizations to quickly scale up or down and has the added benefit of making smaller companies seem much largely than they really are! Essentially this type of a model means a few senior level executives, founders, top managers, or stakeholders are the only full-timers while everyone else is a freelancer.
6. Almost all freelancers
Well at this point all hope is lost as the freelancers take over like a virus (…kidding). This approach is great for the small businesses. My personal business is a great example. I’m one person that works with various freelancers to get help with design, marketing, web development, admin work, audio and video editing, and more. So in the 6th model in the image I’m that little blue dot (but male) and am surrounded by freelancers. This makes a lot of sense for someone like me that works in a very dynamic environment where things change quickly. It just doesn’t make practical or financial sense for me to hire full-time employees.
So what do these 6 models mean? Well, there isn’t a right or wrong approach here. These are just observations of how I’m seeing various organizations work with freelancers. All of these approaches require education, training, the right technology in place, a high level of trust, and open communication and collaboration. Take a read through the above 6 approaches and try to figure out where your company sits and why. What benefits are you seeing? Does it make for you to move up or down in the list? I’d love to hear any stories or example of how your company works with freelancers. I’ll write more about this topic in the future since it seems to be a great point of interest.
Jacob Morgan is a keynote speaker, author (most recently of The Future of Work), and futurist. To have Jacob speak at your event, to get access to his videos, podcasts and articles, or to subscribe to his newsletter you can visit
TheFutureOrganization.com.