Impact of GIG economy on the role of HR

 

With the digital age, traditional working patterns has been changed into digital frame creating new working patterns for employer and employee with new relationships (Tripathi et.al., 2022). GIG economy can be refereed as where employee and employers meet via digital platforms to accomplish specific tasks (Batmunkh et.al., 2022). Gig economy composite of all sorts of work arrangements such as freelancers, consultants, independent contractors and professionals and temporary contract workers. Participants who use gig economy sometimes treat their gigs as the main source of income, some as the secondary or part time income. The advantages of gig workers are that they are cheaper, quicker and can be recruited from anywhere of the world. On the other side disadvantages are low pay, uncertain income, risk of termination and platform users need third party support to review their contracts (Batmunkh et.al., 2022)  

The new challenge for HR representatives is, how to best integrate Gig economy into future workforce model. Most of the gig workers are connected with clients via digital platforms. These digital platform businesses connect self-employed or independent contract workers to clients via online app or website. The platform businesses cannot be considered as employers but as labor market intermediaries (Williams et.al., 2021). However, they also need to have skilled and quality gig workers in order to attract clients but on the other hand they don’t have contractual obligation by mean of employment contract. These intermediary platforms can exercise certain HR practices towards gig workers without the employment such as (Meijerink and Keegan, 2019);

1.     Workforce planning – Match labor supply and demand

2.     Performance management – use of online rating systems to assess the behavior of gig workers.

3.     Compensation and benefits – Gig workers desired behaviors are improved through remuneration for his or her efforts.

4.     Job design – as per the nature of the work this allows gig workers to work whenever they want

5.     Recruitment and selection – Recruit as many gig workers and requesters as possible in order to avoid mismatches in the supply and demand of labor. Recruiting new gig workers through referral schemes. Selection base on the gig workers qualification to have multilateral value to all parties involved in the system.

6.     Training and development – Offer pre-employment training. They do not directly give trainings instead trainings are given through third parties such as unions. For example, poor performing uber drivers in New York city are offered trainings through labor unions.

The traditional HRM practices are designed to increase the relationship between employee and employer to induce the desired behavior of the employee and work towards the organizational goal. But the use of above-mentioned HR practices by the intermediary parties are questionable as they don’t have employable contract between the employee and the intermediary party (Meijerink and Keegan, 2019).

On contrary most of the HR practices mentioned above are implemented based on the digital platform which is algorithmic. Hence gig workers need to self-organize and self-motivate to improve the performance. This leads to be in-human when algorithms take over the tasks that was done traditionally by HR representatives and also remove the interpersonal and empathetic aspect of the human resource management (Duggan, 2020)

 

References

Batmunkh, A., Fekete-Farkas, M. and Lakner, Z., 2022. Bibliometric Analysis of Gig Economy. Administrative Sciences, 12(2), p.51. Available from https://www.mdpi.com/2076-3387/12/2/51 [Accessed on 02nd May 2022].

Duggan, J., Sherman, U., Carbery, R. and McDonnell, A., 2020. Algorithmic management and app‐work in the gig economy: A research agenda for employment relations and HRM. Human Resource Management Journal, 30(1), pp.114-132. Available from https://cora.ucc.ie/bitstream/handle/10468/8584/Duggan_et_al_%282019%29_PDF_%28002%29.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y [Accessed on 02nd May 2022]

Meijerink, J. and Keegan, A., 2019. Conceptualizing human resource management in the gig economy: Toward a platform ecosystem perspective. Journal of managerial psychology. Available from https://www.emerald.com/insight/content/doi/10.1108/JMP-07-2018-0277/full/html [Accessed on 02nd May 2022].

Tripathi, M.A., Tripathi, R., Yadav, U.S. and Shastri, R.K., 2022. Gig Economy: A paradigm shift towards Digital HRM practices. Journal of Positive School Psychology, 6(2), pp.5609-5617. Available from https://journalppw.com/index.php/jpsp/article/view/3434 [Accessed on 02nd May 2022].

Williams, P., McDonald, P. and Mayes, R., 2021. Recruitment in the gig economy: attraction and selection on digital platforms. The International Journal of Human Resource Management, 32(19), pp.4136-4162. Available from https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/09585192.2020.1867613 [Accessed on 02nd May 2022].


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