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Women at Work wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome to the HBR Ideacast from Harvard Business Review. I'm Kurt Nicken.

When you hear the words on-demand workforce or gig economy, the first thing that probably comes to mind is an Uber driver or maybe somebody who drops off an e-commerce package to your home, or maybe you think of a clerical temp worker

or a freelance designer. The reality is the market for on-demand workers is much bigger than that, and in recent years the demand for high-skilled workers that can be hired for projects is booming.

Dozens of companies with names like Top Tao, Catalan, Inocynov, Kaggle and Upwork have created online

platforms for workers such as software coders, manufacturing engineers, digital marketing

experts, and logistics specialists.

This has been fueled by rapid automation and digital transformation at companies, many of whom are

located outside of talent centers for these skills, but now there are also demographic

changes pushing this trend, and the COVID-19 pandemic only seems to be speeding it up.

But it's still early days. Most companies that hire just in time

workers are doing it on an ad hoc basis. They're just beginning to grapple with

what it means to be a company that works this way.

Here to talk through the trend and to give advice for companies and managers who want to be

strategic about this is Joseph Fuller, he's a professor of management at Harvard Business

School, and Allison Bailey is a

managing director and senior partner at Boston Consulting Group. They're co-authors of

the HBR article, Rethinking the on-demand workforce.

Joe and Allison, thanks to both of you for being here.

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