The Gig economy has become a very important source of income for working population around the world. However, gig workers have to choose between the flexibility in work schedules and lesser tax to be paid on one hand, and the social protections and support that are available to traditional employees, on the other.

Pre-pandemic, job safety, reliability and timely appraisals or rewards were the main criteria for most professionals when applying for any job. However, in the post Covid economy, the situation has changed. Economic slowdown, layoffs and hybrid work environment has made organisations reduce their staff across countries and thereby led to several employees resigning from their roles and looking for more flexible working opportunities outside. 

There are more and more opportunities now through new platforms for people to engage in freelancer work across all Industry sectors. They can do it once a day, or once a week or even on a monthly basis. They can do it almost as a full-time job, continuously shifting between, different roles in different companies. 

However, there is a lot of uncertainty over earnings as workers don’t have economic security in a gig economy. What is the impact when you don’t have the overall social safety net that you had before?

How to ensure talented professionals stay back in their organisation is the key challenge faced by HR Teams today. So, what can businesses do to boost employee happiness and ensure retention in a post-Covid world?

Some key measures that can be undertaken across Large, Medium and Small enterprises include, a need for improving leadership conduct, maturing managerial competence and building trust among employees. The way to enhance trust is listed below: 

1. Prioritise employee wellness: Showing employees that you care about their health and wellness was important before the pandemic, but it is even more crucial now. If employees feel their health is at risk in the workplace, it could result in leaving their position for another safer job. So they can be offered paid sick leave, flexible working hours, provide extra safety measures at work and offering better health care benefits and insurance, access to mental health support, free healthy snacks and drinks during the day.

2. Create Culture of Communication: Workers need to know they can speak to their manager whenever they facing any problem at work. Conduct regular feedback surveys on daily experiences at work is very useful to get inputs from permanent employees. Manager and team meetings have to be conducted regularly to build a strong bond.

3. Develop New Hiring Process: Creating an interesting onboarding process for new employees. This can include video conferences with remote workers to help the teams get to know one another. Offering a re-onboarding process for those returning to the office after a long period of working from home. 

4. Offering opportunities for training, development and team building activities: 

By encouraging company culture of building strong relations, the workforce can come back into their daily routine in a post-Covid world. There can be monthly fun outings planned to break monotony of long working hours. These measures can surely help employees want to stay within the business for long despite the increasing attraction towards gig economy.