Independent Contractor Compliance Blog

Last time I critiqued a website article published by a contingent work force vender company. This is part 2 of that series.

The website article cited a University of Arizona study but failed to provide full information about the study and then gave bad advice if you employ highly skilled professionals. I have analyzed this article from two viewpoints:

1. Last time I covered it from an employee versus independent contractor POV.
2. This time I’d like to address the flawed article from a Best Practices POV.

Maybe I should mention that my MBA thesis paper correlated various workplace environmental elements to both long term productivity and expressed worker satisfaction for highly educated, professional workers:  In other words, how to keep your highly skilled, professional workers happy and productive in the long term. In addition, I have 30 successful years in supervision and management positions with professional level workers.

Here are a few of the quotes in the misguided article:

1. Traditionally hired employees are less satisfied with co-workers and bosses when working with larger proportions of temporary workers,
2. Having more temporary coworkers makes full-time workers’ jobs more complicated, since they are always training new people.
3. Helping temporary workers can get in the way of full-time employees completing their work…
4. …temporary workers (are) more negative about their work arrangements compared with standard workers…
5. Temporary workers who had opportunities to transition to standard employment had better attitudes and were better performers than their peers in standard work arrangements…

From these statements the vender company’s article implied that temporary workers are not a happy bunch and that your regular employees resent them being in the company. It urges you to treat everyone (IC and employee) the same and make temporary worker positions the road to a permanent job.

What’s wrong with the article’s conclusions?

Pretty much everything: This article does not draw a distinction between low level, semi-skilled workers and highly educated professionals. It apparently assumes both groups are motivated by the same career aspirations. The article failed to tell readers that the study collected data from part-time, and temporary workers who all performed “clerical and low-level administrative work (such as) payment processing, account reconciliation, and inquiry/complaint handling.” The workers in the study were trained how to do their duties and “tended to be assigned simpler, repetitive tasks with shorter completion times…”

It appears the website article was published by a vender who apparently thinks in terms of providing lower skilled workers to client companies-not high skilled and highly educated professionals. The article should be viewed in that light.

There’s a difference between repetitive, low skilled production workers and highly educated and highly skilled professionals.

Contrary to the website article’s conclusion, professional workers thrive on complex work assignments, including being the “go to person” for training and other special duties. In fact, I believe if today’s highly skilled professional workers are not challenged by their work they become bored and move on when a more challenging job becomes available. A high salary alone won’t keep them. Also the skilled professional worker wants freedom to perform the tasks assigned according to their own judgment and experience. They want to be able to make choices and have control over the work. If there is too much control over the work or if there is only one repetitive way to do the work they will get bored. They are not interested in simple, easily trained, repetitive tasks that offer no room for individual expression or unique problem solving abilities.  Therefore, highly skilled professionals thrive on complicated work assignments.

Only the lowest, most unproductive worker, who is simply putting in eight hours for a paycheck, would complain about being given more responsibility or being assigned more interesting and complicated duties to perform.

Also, I believe when a highly educated, top notch professional comes into a company to do a job they usually bring a unique set of skills the company is missing. They are appreciated for this contribution-not resented.

Finally, many of today’s highly educated, top notch professionals do not want to be tied down twenty or thirty years to the same employer, doing the same duties year-after-year. They are mobile. They want to move-on and move-up, taking on new challenges. They aren’t interested in a temporary assignment that is a doorway to a long term employment relationship.

So if your company employs contingent workers (IC or employee), who are highly skilled and highly educated professionals, you can toss the work force vender’s website article because it doesn’t apply to you.

You may also want to rethink your contingent worker vender-both employee and independent contractor-to insure they are meeting your professional staffing needs.