Human Resources Issues for Senior Management
Issue link: https://digital.hrreporter.com/i/699912
The gig economy — where a contingent workforce is hired on a short-term, project basis — along with the sharing economy are expanding, as seen with the likes of Uber and AirBnB. But what does that mean for HR-related issues? We talked to five CEOs to find out. to grips By Sarah Dobson 12/CANADIAN HR STRATEGY with the gig economy DARRELL BRICKER CEO of Ipsos Public Affairs Worldwide in Toronto The market research fi rm has 600 employees in Canada In a way, the gig economy is inevitable, according to Darrell Bricker, CEO of Ipsos Public Affairs World- wide in Toronto. "When you've got so much technology out there and you're living in an age in which the entire content of human knowledge is available, it's inconceivable that anybody wouldn't think that people would use that type of information to challenge some of the conventions for how we make things and how we distribute them. And I think that that's what we're seeing with the sharing economy," he says. "When you have the most educated population we've ever had in the world, in any way that you can measure it… and you have such access to information, it's inevitable that what they're going to do is challenge whatever conventional systems exist out there." While everybody talks about employer-employee loyalty, nobody actually lives it — particularly those who are technology-enabled and younger, says Bricker, citing research that shows many people have to leave their place of employment to advance their careers. "Given an environment like that, is it any wonder that people are going to use technology and infor- mation and empower themselves to be able to make that choice?" he says. "The only way up is like playing checkers — there's no straight lines on any of this, it's just going sideways a lot of the time." And given that millennials will make up a huge share of the workforce in a very short period of time, "they and the way they look at solving problems are going to be a big part of how the world of employment is going to be handled," says Bricker. But the truth is people don't aspire to this idea of exible, on-demand work — they deal with it, he says. "People want to have regular, stable work and they would like to work for one employer, so they learn to deal with this type of environment. But… if you compare the two options, the vast majority of the people would prefer the single employer with a single paycheque," says Bricker. So, will a sharing economy eventually become the norm? "There's ways of adding this up on a global basis that make it look like it's a big part of the economy but when you actually look at the amount of paid labour that the sharing economy is responsible for, I think that you'd be hard-pressed to show that it's more than a fraction of what traditional employ- ment is," says Bricker. Coming