Full-time Benefits for Your Freelance Workforce? It Could be Coming.

Chances are good you have at least a few millennials within your contract workforce and you soon enough may have some members of Generation Z (those born no earlier than 1997, making the oldest among them 23 years old) on your team, as well.

And what do these freelancers want? Flexibility and freedom! And they therefore are embracing the freelancer/contractor lifestyle. What’s more, as the external workforce continues to grow – and will do so ever more as Boomers and members of Generation Y retire and millennials and Gen Z members move up – companies may have to start addressing the needs of this growing and soon-to-be-dominant population of workers.

How can you attract these tech-/digital-savvy workers to your business? Offer them both work flexibility with full benefits packages!

Yes, that’s correct: you may want to start exploring offering your contractors – people who are not employees – benefits packages.

Think about it: who wouldn’t want to have the flexibility of working for yourself as a freelancer/contractor while also enjoying workplace benefits currently offered only to employees? We’ll be frank: sign us UP!

Flexibility: It’s Not Just for Freelancers Any More

Even employees are craving – and getting – more leeway in how they work, where they work and when they work. They are, in effect, looking at flexibility as “the new norm.”

And employees are themselves starting to get behind the idea of providing a freelance workforce with full-time benefits: employees at SurveyMonkey themselves wondered if their benefits – with which they said they were quite satisfied, thankyouverymuch – could be extended to the company’s freelancers. (Note: SurveyMonkey did start offering employee benefits to its freelance workforce last year.)

Just Like Employees, Skilled Freelancers are Hard to Find

Contractors with hard-to-find-skills (coding, marketing/social media management, MySQL programming, machine learning, etc.), are becoming harder-and-harder to find…and keep! More and more skilled professionals are looking at freelancing rather than working as an employee: 51 percent of these professionals say that “no amount of money would entice them to take a traditional job,” so because the best-of-the-best can pretty much name their price and the circumstances of their contract with you, it may be time to start offering freelancers benefits!

Start offering benefits now and we can only imagine how easy it will be for you to attract – and choose – only the best contractors available. And keep them for the long haul.

(Warning: if this takes off and if you come to the benefits-for-freelancers table late, your reputation as a top freelancer employer may suffer with each month you delay.)

Managing Your Freelance Workforce Benefits with Aysling

Our Aysling Vendor Management System will help you offer those benefits to your external workforce. Our VMS allows you to automate your payments to them, and it’s an easy transition to managing their benefits, as well.

Our back-office operations system is perfect for industries that use a good deal of contractors, such as multi-media and graphic design, software designers and technical consultants, media publishers, mechanical and industrial engineering businesses, event management services, among others.

Our system helps you manage and match invoices with payments, manage purchase orders, track contractors’ timesheets, invoices and projects, and more.

If you’d like to learn more about how the Aysling can help streamline operations at your company, email us via our contact form  or call us at 877-297-5464.