The Workers PartyBusiness Models for Non-FTE Workers

Third Party Power

Vendors (especially employers)

and Markets (especially customers)

always seem to have the work world under their control.

But there is a third party: Workers (the Self).

Workers need their own business model.

Enough with the Sharing!

I’d like to exchange my time for money, at my discretion.

I don’t want to be a full-time employee with a boss.

But Stop with the Sharing Economy hype.

Here’s a stupid business model: I’ll “share” my car with a multi-billion-dollar international corporation, for $7/hr, and agree to stick around myself while they use it.

The simplest way for a worker to not be an employee of a company is for that company to be the worker’s customer of record.

But that is still too vague in practice, and I may not be able to go that far. I need a good business model for myself.

Lease

Trade

Borrow

Share

Characteristics of Self-Determination

A worker’s primary assets are Time and Property.

As a rule, a person who decides to work is deciding to “employ” two assets that they already have: Time and Property.

Key decisions get made about why, when and where to apply those assets. Those are seen as opportunities and perhaps become agreed assignments. Key decisions are also made about what importance is attributed to the provision and use of those assets.

Aside from showing up for work, employees don’t make most of those decisions. Non-employee workers do. Non-employee workers can still be workers who are compensated for their work.

Resource offer

Independent

Contractor

Temporary

Freelance

Status type

More authority

Lessauthority

More divestiture

Lessdivestiture

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RECRUITER

engagement

How do opportunity and willingness get connected?

Various roles match workers to needs for production.

AGENT

BROKER

SELF

MARKETVENDOR

The ability to do work does not create someone else’s need for work to be done.

Agents, recruiters and brokers all participate in (a.) finding potential matchups of workers with the existing need for them, and in (b.) setting a compensation to be offered for the worker’s production.

But those participants all only represent the opportunities for work to be compensated.

Aside from making proposals, they do not actually create the compensation for the production being sought.

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Employer defines the

value

compensation

How is the work valued?

Compensation to engage and produce is variously calculated .

Worker defines the

value

Customerdefines the

value

SELF

MARKETVENDOR

The decision to use personal time to do work is based on the idea that there will be compensation (perhaps negotiated) for being productive.

Compensation can come from three different parties of interest: the Self, the Market, and a Vendor.

Each party decides what role to assume (worker, employer, customer) in order to establish its offer of compensation (the type & level) to exchange for the worker’s production. Those valuations can be similar from party to party, or they can be dramatically different.

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Lease

Trade

Borrow

Share

flexibility

type

capacity

exclusivity

What aspect of production availability is in demand?

availability

A worker’s production is requested as an agreed resource.

The worker may produce something either before or during its immediate demand.

The demand may emphasize certain aspects of utilization that it imposes on production, such as flexibility, or exclusivity.

Like requirements, those aspects want to be satisfied individually - but often some of them want to co-exist with some others.

As a result, the worker is seen as a resource, and terms of utility agreement take on various forms (e.g. lease, share, etc.)

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Independent

Part-time

Freelance

Contractor

flexibility

availability skill

capacity

exclusivity

What terms are offered by the non-employee worker?

A worker’s primary terms are Authority and Commitment.

When a worker has chosen one or more roles (Self, Market, Vendor) the next step is to formulate the production that the worker will offer.

That begins with defining how the worker’s production will be available, along with what distinguishes the relevance of the offered production.

The worker assumes a posture that supports the ability to sustain the relevance.

Like “requirements”, several postures can independently apply but they are likely to be blended in practice.

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Independent

Temporary

Freelance

Contractor

CLIENT

availability GIG

CONTRACT

JOB

What type of worker makes the commitment?

Different types of workers make different kinds of commitments.

Outside of full-time employee status, a worker has the option of deciding how to become available to other parties.

The worker may decide how much freedom to retain in providing availability. In particular, the worker can consider how to offer the relationship as an agreement.

When a party representing a need for production discovers a worker, the Worker-Need relationship appears in a variety of optional formats.

To the worker, different formats mean different kinds of commitment.

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The future of working

• Assurance of future work is typically tackled by non-fulltime-employees (non-FTEs) according to their appetite for status and assets

• For a self-determining worker, the implication of the worker’s options is that a given kind of offer to work corresponds better with a certain status than with other statuses.

• Also, there are implications mainly about the increasing duration of the total period of compensation, from a bottom-up hierarchy of Gigs, Contracts, Jobs and Clients.

Lease

Trade

Borrow

Share

Characteristics of Self-Determination

Non-FTE workers “connect the dots” across three kinds of concerns

Resource offer

Independent

Contractor

Temporary

Freelance

Status type

More authority

Lessauthority

More divestiture

Lessdivestiture

Job

Client

Contract

Gig

Compensation Span

More compensations

Fewercompensations

©2016 Malcolm Ryder / Archestra Research

©2016 Malcolm Ryder / Archestra Researchwww.archestra.commryder@archestra.com