California plans to fully open its economy on June 15, followed by New York on July 1.

The reopening presents a unique opportunity to reinvent your organization, serve your customers and build the engine that will propel your positioning over the next 50 years.

It also presents a unique challenge for retaining your best talents. As Michael Solomon, author of Game Changer and CEO of 10x Management told me, “We’re about to see job rotation like never before.”

It sounds contradictory, but the solution to innovation and retention is not within your own four walls. They are remote freelancers in the Human Cloud.

Covid has accelerated the transition to the human cloud

Executives from Fortune 50 to 50 startups have already delved into the human cloud. According to Harvard Business School’s Building The On-Demand Workforce report, 90% of business leaders said flexible talent would be somewhat or very important to their organization’s future competitive advantage. Brands like Microsoft, General Electric, Intel, BBC Worldwide, Hollister, GoPro, Kaplan are just a few that publicly recognize their hiring of freelancers.

Covid has simply accentuated this growing trend since 73% of managers who see the value of remote work hire independent professionals.

The human cloud is your engine for talent access, talent retention and innovation

1: Tackle the talent shortage and increase salaries

According to the National Federation of Independent Businesses, 42% of business owners had openings that could not be filled in March. As Holly Wade, Executive Director of the NFIB Research Center said, “They have come to this point and they have adjusted their business operations to weather the worst of the pandemic and now they are grappling with the inability to increase. their business. operations when they find the opportunities ”. This is nothing new in the pandemic. Johnny C. Taylor, Jr., president and CEO of the Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM) said in 2018, “We now have more jobs than people to do them, which means our hand -work [shortages] will get worse ”.

There is also an increase in the rise in wages. As the president of a leading technology consulting firm told me, “The pandemic has resulted in a significant increase in salaries for tech talent as companies in most industries have shifted to technology-driven organizations. digital.”

But both the “shortage” of talent and the “escalation” of wages are misleading.

There is no shortage of talent. Over a billion freelancers around the world are willing to help, they just don’t want to be employees as 51% of freelancers say no amount of money would entice them into a full-time job.

Wages do not need to increase. Freelancers can and generally prefer project-based work. Take Dani Ifrim, a full stack designer who has helped clients through website design, branding, and even an online mall to help small businesses interact with their customers.

Instead of a salary, Dani works on a project basis, with a sample of her exact projects below.

2: Retention of the best employees through empowerment

Your best performers present a contradiction. They want increased responsibility, but exhausted employees are 2.6 times more likely to actively seek new employment.

How can you prevent these top performers from actively looking for new jobs? Give them a budget to hire freelancers, as freelancers allow employees to produce more, cover a wider scope of work, while balancing burnout with having help. As said in The Human Cloud, “What would you do if you had a world of experts in your pocket?” Think of the five-star designers, developers, data scientists. ”

Or as Liane Scult, Microsoft’s first independent program manager, said, “Engaging freelancers can help increase full-time employees. Whether it’s project managers having designers to help with their diagrams, or video producers with screenwriters, hiring freelancers increases the potential of each of our employees to create more. ”

Here are some use case examples of how freelancers can amplify your employees:

• What if your product marketing manager had a designer to help A / B test landing pages?
• What if your product manager had a content writer to help you optimize website copy?
• What if your sales reps had a researcher to brief their meetings or get up-to-date information on competitors?

3: Allow speed and experimentation

Chances are you will need to pivot, create new deals, or scale. Freelancers are ideal for this environment because they offer hyper specialization, speed and profitability.

At Microsoft, Liane Scult told me: “We launched our Gig Economy pilot in 2017 to meet the needs of our customers, increase the speed of innovation and provide different resource models to allow us to scale quickly, agility and specialist expertise – online and on demand. ”

After completing more than 2,000 independent projects spanning 25 internal teams and hundreds of employees, Microsoft reported:

• Reduced talent mobilization time from 20 to 5.4 days
• 4.9 / 5 freelance stars

Likewise at Corel Corporation, after completing nearly 150 projects per month, they said:

• 88% average fill rate of posted jobs (industry average is around 50%)
• 4.87 out of 5 success ratings
• time savings of over 100 hours per month

It is an exciting time to be a leader. Next week, we’ll learn how to hire and work with the best freelancers. Stay tuned!