They’re Not Employees, They’re People

Two extraordinary changes have crept up on the business world without most of us paying much attention to them. First, a staggering number of people who work for organizations are no longer traditional employees of those organizations. And second, a growing number of businesses have outsourced employee relations; they no longer manage major aspects of their relationships with the people who are their formal employees. These trends are unlikely to reverse themselves anytime soon. In fact, they’ll probably accelerate. And they’re happening for some very good reasons, as we’ll see.

That said, the attenuation of the relationship between people and the organizations they work for represents a grave danger to business. It’s one thing for a company to take advantage of long-term freelance talent or to out-source the more tedious aspects of its human resources management. It’s quite another to forget, in the process, that developing talent is business’s most important task—the sine qua non of competition in a knowledge economy. If by off-loading employee relations, organizations also lose their capacity to develop people, they will have made a devil’s bargain indeed.

In a traditional workforce, the worker serves the system; in a knowledge workforce, the system must serve the worker.