Freelancers Drive Company Culture Forward
The catastrophe that was the European Super League in April had me wishing I was in the internal stakeholder meeting where some bright spark presented their algorithm for the true value of a football club. Something along the lines TTS (Total Ticket Sales) x SMF (Social Media Following) x MPEM (Merchandising Potential in Emerging Markets) = MLC (Most Loved Club). The complex part of the algorithm being a tightly guarded coefficient, the brand manager would love to tell you, but would then have to kill you if divulged.
I would argue the secret coefficient is quite easy, and jaw-droppingly unbelievable that it was overlooked — the fans. It was truly the day for the little person. The little person who collectively changed maybe not the hearts, but certainly the minds of those in power.
Hats off to the leading teams and leagues of France, Germany and Portugal for declining to participate in the league in the first place and made it clear that football was nothing without the fans.
From a business perspective, the underestimation of fans got me thinking about how certain groups of people are often underestimated when it comes to driving company culture.
You can of course draw a straight line between the value of fans to a football club and the value of committed employees to both drive a company’s vision but also drive the culture in which this vision is delivered.
But is this value generated restricted to tenure or employment status?
Can a company’s culture be evidenced, and promoted, beyond card-carrying permanent members of staff? Can it be driven by say, the humble freelancer? I believe it not only can but that in the labour market of 2021 and beyond, it must.
Omitting the value of the fans and their influence on a football club’s market cap was shortsighted. So is doing the same when it comes to considering the value of people who interact with your company on a flexible basis.
Freelancers bring needed expertise and experience to a project — that bit we know. But it’s all the additional aspects of a freelancer’s toolkit that is so valuable to a company culture but which is so often overlooked.
Freelancers by their very nature are entrepreneurs. Their business may only consist of themselves but they are no less driven by many of the same metrics a typical startup looks at. For example, if a freelancer was to do their own cohort analysis, they would be looking at the same things many startup founders obsess over — Are they retaining clients and are those clients spending more with them? — either through longer projects or higher value jobs because those clients see the value in what they do and bring to both project and company.
The best freelancers I’ve met have made themselves indispensable to clients not only because of their expertise but also the part they play in fostering company culture and adding to it by bringing in new ideas from previous projects and organisations. A freelancer has an incredibly unique vantage point here. They bring new ideas to enhance a project and take away a view of a client that spreads the reputation of that organisation throughout the wider market. The sheer frequency of this exchange makes it so much more powerful than when a long term, permanent employee transitions to a new role.
I remember when discussing my own career decisions with my father in the early nineties, the most perplexing thing to him was the frequency I felt comfortable in switching to a new organisation , ie. 2–4 years. As a man who had worked for his employer for 40 years, this attitude blew his mind and led to many a heated discussion. Fast forward 30 years and the average tenure of a freelancer is 2 weeks to 3 months, he would think we’ve hit some event horizon. Today’s accepted, and fast-growing attitude to contingent labour as the most desirable employment path for both individuals and organisations has changed the face of the labour market. Post COVID, utilising freelancers to drive better company culture will only accelerate as this attitude and way-of-working becomes the norm. Time to tool up.
SVM.
