A recent article citing the 2017 Deloitte Global Human Capital Trends report notes that “the accelerating rate of change in business, the economy, and society challenges both business and HR to adopt new rules for leading, organizing, motivating, managing, and engaging the 21st-century workforce.” Here we go again! Rewriting the rules to keep up with rapid changes in this new era. Only this time even larger scale changes at an even more furious pace.

Addressing the 2017 Trends, the tenth (and last) Trend is “The Future of Work: The Augmented Workforce.”  That “workforce” includes, among other things, robots, artificial intelligence, freelancers, crowds, and yes – “gig economy” workers. So to the naysayers who believe the gig economy is just a passing fad, consider the evidence in reports like this and experts taking the position that every job (even lawyer jobs) must be redesigned to adapt to constant changes around the world.

Consider some of these points included in the Report: 

• “Organizations that are leveraging open talent are partnering with temporary labor marketplace companies such as ShiftGig and BountyJobs, e-staffing agencies such as HIRED and CloserIQ, freelance management systems such as OnForce and JobBliss, and crowdsourced recruitment systems such as Amazon’s Mechanical Turk and Gigwalk.”
• “More than half of surveyed global business leaders (53 percent) report weak capabilities in relation to gig and talent economy resources, and only 8 percent rate their companies’ ability to manage crowdsourcing as excellent.”
• “Improving these capabilities will determine which businesses can attract needed talent and which struggle to identify and incorporate indemand skills.”