Over the past three years, the American workplace has undergone all kinds of changes as a result of the work-from-home revolution. Perhaps the most widely discussed has been the way the remote age has prompted workers to emotionally detach from their jobs. Some bemoaned it as quiet quitting; others celebrated it as a much-needed correction to the toxic demands of.
For companies, offering full-time employment has always been expensive and risky. But there was one reason bosses were reluctant to outsource jobs: They couldn't imagine trusting people to get their work done out of sight. They supervised by way of butts-in-seats surveillance — checking that people were at their desks, typing away and making calls and furrowing their eyebrows in a way that suggested they were working hard. That ruled out contractors, because contractors work remotely.
Good or bad, the push to hire more part-time and contract workers will provide an overall boost to the economy. After all, for those who otherwise wouldn't have or couldn't have worked at all, a job — even if it doesn't come with all the perks of being a full-time employee — is better than no job at all. "It's probably going to increase labor supply by maybe 1% to 2%, which is actually a huge number," Bloom says.
Jessica Schultz, who founded a consultancy called Amplify Group last year, has been grappling with the tension between full-time employment versus gig work. One of the services Amplify offers is serving as a "fractional" chief revenue officer for early-stage companies that can't yet afford to bring one on full time. And her own staff, which is fully remote, consists primarily of part-time contractors, several of whom live in developing countries.