The imperative for an alternative talent management strategy

According to Deloitte’s 2024 Global Human Capital Trends survey, workforce planning may be growing more complex because there are more options available today—many driven by workers themselves—for building an agile workforce ecosystem with a combination of full-time, part-time, contingent, and contract workers.

Many organizations are interested in deploying generative AI and other automation tools as part of a digital transformation, but they may struggle to find the appropriate talent to execute at the needed speed or scale.

For many years, people viewed contract, freelance, and gig employment as “alternative work” options considered supplementary to full-time jobs. Today, this segment of the workforce has gone mainstream, and it needs to be managed strategically.

Given growing skills shortages and the low birth rate in many countries, leveraging and managing “alternative” workforces will become essential to business growth in the years ahead.

Originally conceived of as contract work, “alternative” work today includes work performed by outsourced teams, contractors, freelancers, gig workers (paid-for tasks), and crowd (outsourced networks).

Deloitte’s millennial study found that 64 per cent of full-time workers want to do “side hustles” to make extra money.  The world is seeing rapid growth in the number of people working under such arrangements and Thailand is no exception.  

The Destination Thailand Visa was launched on June 1 which enables remote workers to stay in Thailand for up to five years.

For organizations that want to grow and access critical skills, managing alternative forms of employment has become critical. Certain trends are creating more depth and scale across the range of alternative talent pools, such as retirees reentering the workforce, people spending time caring for children and ageing parents, and individuals going back to school.

Flexibility, being able to better control their careers and easier access to stimulating work are factors in the popularity of gig workers in Thailand.

Our 2024 Deloitte survey showed that using alternative workers can enhance organizational performance.  Managing alternative work and workers well is strategically important as it enables an organization to put the right talent in place where and when it’s most needed to get results, in a labor market where traditional on-balance-sheet talent is becoming even harder to find.

How fully are organizations capitalizing on the alternative workforce today? Our research suggests most organizations look at alternative work arrangements as a transactional solution, not as a strategic important source of talent.

Very few companies have established processes to manage and develop alternative work sources; however, a significant number have confirmed they either managed alternative workers inconsistently or had few or no processes for managing them at all.

These organizations are using alternative work tactically as a way to “fill slots”, not strategically as a long-term solution for the future.

Engaging alternative workers strategically is harder than it looks. To do so, companies have to look beyond “managing” contractors and freelancers to “optimizing” and “leveraging” the alternative workforce deliberately and well.  What is needed is a wholesale rewriting of how organizations operate as it relates to alternative labour – one that allows it to connect the appropriate talent with the appropriate roles no matter how the talent is sourced.

Part of the answer lies in connecting the various parts of the enterprise involved, often in a fragmented manner, in hiring alternative workers. This includes procurement, IT and, increasingly, HR.

Businesses must consider issues of inclusion, diversity, fairness and trust when constructing organizational systems around alternative work. Alternative workers can have different backgrounds and cultures than many traditional workers, and these individuals are often accessed in different ways.  

It’s important that the entire workforce, both alternative and traditional, be treated with respect about culture, inclusion, and work assignments – and that perceptions on all sides reflect these values.

Risks and challenges like these are not insurmountable, and the alternative workforce is now a critical mainstay of the workforce for a growing number of employers in Thailand.

Organizations that take this workforce seriously can build strategies and programs to access and engage talented people wherever they may sit in the labour pool, driving business growth and extending the diversity of the workforce.

Michael Fiore
Leader, Business Process Solutions Services
Deloitte Thailand