In traditional employment decisions, one employee is hired to fill one position. The capacity and talent requirements of the company must align nearly perfectly with the availability and skills of the person hired.
With some clever approaches you can deviate a little. For example, you can consider part-time employment or involving interns as a limited workaround.
However, in many cases the workload requirements change week-to-week, and this fluctuation might not even be predictable. Scenarios may also involve working on weekends, periods when you would need two people at the same time, or someone with a very different skillset.
This aspect of traditional employment can be thought of as “quantised” – having just a limited possible set of values.
And what about being “Boolean”?
In Boolean logic, values can have two states: true or false. Will you hire the applicant? This is a yes-or-no question.
“I’d like to hire this person for the next six to nine months, and depending on how the business goes, I might need 20% less of them or 30% more” is a realistic and challenging requirement to handle efficiently.
Moving from true to false and back is also difficult and costly. Hiring someone takes a lot of time. Letting them go is similarly exhausting.
All of this results in high levels of inefficiencies and trade-offs. You hire someone who is not fully suited for the job, you retain them even if they are underutilized, assign them tasks that are slightly outside their area of experience and talent. If business changes or their performance deteriorates, you hope to be able to manage the situation without too much of a downside.
In addition, there will undoubtedly be paid holidays and perhaps sick leaves, which can make the coverage even more challenging.
A continuous and fuzzy alternative (almost like the tail of a Maine Coon)
In realistic business scenarios it is likely that your needs do not fully align with the 9-to-5 weekly routine, are not the same each and every day, and cannot be realistically assigned to a single person due to the wide and conflicting range of possible skills (e.g. being precise or being artistic).
And plans, of course, are just “plans.” They might change, and you would like to see how things unfold, make changes, cancel or take up more, and likely you would be happy to forego additional investment, such as extra computer or software or desk or office space for a new employee.
This is where our “Maine Coon” solution of flexible business services comes in.
- You don’t know what might happen half a year from now? No problem.
- You don’t have a specific plan for what to do, but would like to try and see? No problem.
- You might need some equipment, but perhaps not? No problem.
- What you need is not exactly a full-time position, it can be more, or it can be less? No problem.
- You might realise you don’t want to move this way after all? No problem.
Our flexible services are designed to help you with these otherwise rigid situations.
