The new type of CFO, and why Australian businesses need one

We’ve never witnessed such rapid transformation in Australian business. Staff shortages, a more flexible approach to work, work-from-anywhere principles and countless other changes have made it hard for businesses to stay ahead of the hiring curve.

To succeed in tomorrow’s world your business needs to be an adaptive, dynamic organism, driven by a combination of full-time staff whose knowledge of the company and market is unmatched, and independent outsiders who bring new perspectives to the table as well as inject much-needed man-hours.

Due to the pandemic, comfort with Zoom and the desire to continue to work remotely, more people than ever are selling their skills on a project by project basis. The gig economy is growing three times faster than the total US workforce, and more than 50% of us will participate in project-based work by 2027.

On-the-fly workforce flexibility was one of the keys to success even before impacts like COVID-19 and the expansion of remote work technologies. With uncertain times still looming for businesses, a recent study showed 78% of business leaders are more likely to hire freelancers than full-time staff.

Yet even without economic uncertainty, many companies are finding freelancers are the best way to scale up or down quickly to meet changing technologies. They not only help you meet your workload goals and promote diversity and inclusion, the fresh experience people with their own stories can bring to your workplace is something you can’t put a price tag on.

Until now, finding and managing freelancers has been the responsibility of the relevant department head or hiring manager — accountants for financial analysis, art directors for graphic design, etc.

Playing catchup

However, there’s a disconnect. While workforces have become more agile, people management practices haven’t. Typically there’s no single standard for designing the experience freelancers have working for your company — it’s often done in an improvised manner that’s rushed through when the need arises, with no formal procedures that can be replicated seamlessly next time (which will exponentially increase efficiency overall).

Freelancers need to be onboarded quickly and effectively, given tech support, integrated into the work team or given access to the right business systems, and doing so in a haphazard way can affect productivity, output and your reputation among the communities those freelancers belong to.

Finding and appointing freelancers takes preparation and design. ‘Throwing’ people at a workload problem never works. The managers of departments that need freelancers often have little idea how to find them or how many they’ll need. Even when they do, there’s little thought given to the experience that a freelancer will have in your business.

Cue the chief freelance officer

All of which means one thing. With more companies than ever taking advantage of an ever-fluid workforce, it’s high time you hired a CFO. Not a chief financial officer — I’m talking about the kind of CFO you didn’t even know you needed.

The chief freelance officer.

Their responsibility, in a nutshell, is to create the right experience for any external talent that engages with your company, whether it’s an inbound casual staffer in the office for months or a remote worker for an afternoon. The chief freelance officer will design and execute policies and systems to integrate contract workers with the right people and the right projects while keeping watch on hiring budgets versus workload capacity.

They’ll also ensure your company is working with the right people, bringing a thorough understanding of the needs of the managers overseeing the project and working closely with recruiters, HR and talent acquisition teams.

They will wield sophisticated search, hiring, budget and human resource distribution tools to help manage the workflow of a fluid workforce that will also provide full financial accountability to executives and the Board.

In a way, the chief freelance officer has the widest remit for employee satisfaction in the company. They will help not just the business realise its maximum potential but help every freelancer who comes through the door to thrive and be their best.

Amid the ‘Great Resignation’ and other upheavals in the labour market, there’s a new paradigm of ensuring your business provides the best possible experience not just for customers and users but staff. Whatever their terms of employment, it’s now become the primary goal of many companies, and it has a tangible effect on their ability to compete and thrive.

In order to realise that goal across the organisation — and beyond it — the chief freelance officer is your next secret weapon.