Is your organization taking full advantage of today’s on-demand workforce? Disruptive factors like globalization, virtualization, and technological advancement are forcing businesses across all sectors to transform at an accelerated pace. Fortunately, change is always accompanied by opportunity. Here are a few ideas for how to leverage the gig economy to do more with your business.

Accelerate growth the smart way with on-demand workers.

When it’s time to grow, companies with little workforce elasticity may break because they can’t stretch. The recruiting pipeline is only one area of concern. Businesses that want to grow their on-site workforce with full-time employees face many other concerns, such as:

• Adding square footage and equipment to an existing workplace
• Setting up satellite locations
• Upgrading benefits programs to attract talent
• Scaling training & development

A rushed decision or misstep in any of these areas can effectively erase the profits that should accompany an increase in size. If your organization doesn’t have the infrastructure in place to support rapid growth, this is the ideal time to hire a freelance workforce. This approach has the dual benefit of buying time to make better long-term decisions and capturing immediate revenue that can be used to fund traditional expansion later. At the same time, performance and quality don’t have to suffer if the right tools are used to ensure visibility and accountability.

Focus independent contractors and employees on profitable activities.

Leveraging an independent source of human capital allows your business to experiment with directing growth in the path of least effort and greatest return. In practical terms, this often comes down to deciding which roles to assign to an on-demand workforce. In one scenario, you might identify profitable, high-volume activities that are directly linked to customer acquisition or sales. Connecting with a large number of independent professionals who are immediately available to start working could ramp up revenue very quickly. In a different situation, tasks might be low-value, relatively low-skill support activities that still have a high priority in terms of keeping the business operating smoothly. In that case, relieving experienced long-term employees of these assignments would allow your organization to act more strategically in pursuing innovation.

Pivot easily with trends using on-demand talent.

Has Google changed an algorithm again, impacting your search engine rankings and causing online sales numbers to drop? According to Ryan Shelley at Search Engine Land, it’s not necessary to panic when this happens. But it does mean your business must act fast to implement new SEO practices and reverse any losses. Even better, if you act more swiftly than competitors, you can capture some of their market share as well. A pool of experienced freelancers can step in to revise hundreds of web pages or thousands of product descriptions in short order to revamp a company’s web presence in weeks instead of months. In our experience, this kind of fast turnaround is a game-changer for even the largest enterprises.

Perhaps shifts in demand, demographics, and other factors are providing an opportunity to capture a larger portion of your market. The sharing economy and the demand for unprecedented convenience are changing how brick-and-mortar and digital businesses operate. And according to PWC, it’s not just millennials who are driving these trends—consumers over age 50 are rapidly getting on board. Keeping up with this fresh demand might mean adding a home or office delivery option to an existing retail line of goods or services, a move that would necessitate the use of an on-demand workforce. Using free agents and a platform that’s already designed to make that happen is much simpler than building a delivery service into your existing organizational structure.

With an expanded perspective, it’s easy to see how using on-demand talent is about more than cost savings on labor. It’s about moving your company quickly and effectively toward its growth and profit goals. View a demo to see how OneSpace can help make that happen.