Читать книгу Side Hustles For Dummies - Alan R. Simon - Страница 23

A somewhat surprising byproduct of the COVID-19 pandemic and its disruption of global business has been the so-called “Great Resignation” of 2020 and 2021.

The early stages of the pandemic, in spring and early summer of 2020, saw massive job loss in the United States and around the world. U.S. unemployment peaked at 13 percent in May 2020 and may actually have been a point or two higher than what was officially reported (www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2020/06/11/unemployment-rose-higher-in-three-months-of-covid-19-than-it-did-in-two-years-of-the-great-recession) before beginning to drop back to more “normal” levels in the latter part of 2020 and into 2021.

Normally, high unemployment levels lead to workers exhibiting three perfectly natural behaviors:

 Those who are lucky enough to avoid being laid off often cling to the security of their current jobs for dear life, doing everything they can to avoid joining the ranks of the unemployed.

 When an economic recovery arrives and picks up steam, many people continue to cling to their jobs. Maybe they do so out of gratitude for being able to keep their jobs, or perhaps they saw the financial and personal toll on others who weren’t as fortunate and did lose their jobs.

 Many of those who do find themselves unemployed — temporarily, they hope — do everything they can to find new jobs and then likewise cling to those jobs and do everything in their power not to again lose that job security.

But 2020 was different. Maybe the extreme safety net measures taken by governments all around the world made this severe downturn different from previous ones. In the United States, for example, state-level unemployment payments were boosted by additional federal government money that came through the Pandemic Unemployment Assistance (PUA) program. The bottom line was that for many people, unemployment during the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic wasn’t as disruptive and painful on a personal or family basis as it might otherwise have been.

With some of the lost-my-job pressure reduced, many of those newly unemployed workers started dabbling in a little bit of this or a little bit of that during their now-free time. Others who kept their jobs were working at home with far greater schedule flexibility than they had ever had before. Many people enjoyed another side benefit of working from home: saving one, two, three, four — or maybe even more! — hours a day by not having to commute to and from an office. And what did many of those folks do with their now-free time? They also dabbled in a little bit of this or a little bit of that.

Stated another way: Lots of people picked up the side-hustle habit during the spring and summer of 2020.

By the autumn of 2020, COVID infection rates were dropping along with the unemployment rate. Largely due to the extraordinary measures taken by governments around the world, the business world didn’t collapse during the worst of the pandemic. Now, recovery was on the horizon, and many companies began refilling the positions they had terminated earlier in the year.

But tens of millions of people in the United States, and tens of millions more around the world, had a taste of the world of side hustles and were now rethinking the very idea of rejoining the full-time workforce.

Even more people eyeballed side hustles from the security and stability of their careers and decided to ditch full-time work in favor of a portfolio of side hustles. An October 2021 study by leading consultancy McKinsey noted that 19 million workers had quit their full-time jobs since April of that year (www.mckinsey.com/business-functions/people-and-organizational-performance/our-insights/great-attrition-or-great-attraction-the-choice-is-yours)! Where would a person head after quitting a full-time job? For many, the answer is crystal clear: the world of side hustles!

Jobs with lower wages and even lower satisfaction levels — not to mention traditionally high turnover — have been particularly hard hit by the Great Resignation. Many of these jobs were in the service industry: restaurants, retailers, cleaning- and repair-oriented businesses, and others. But surprisingly, according to a September 2021 Harvard Business Review article (https://hbr.org/2021/09/who-is-driving-the-great-resignation), “resignation rates are highest among mid-career employees.” Maybe even more surprising: “resignations are highest in the tech and health care industries.”

And so, the Great Resignation got underway during a climate when most experts would have expected otherwise. People still needed to make money somehow, though, which is a large part of the reason that so many people jumped onto the side-hustle bandwagon for the first time beginning in 2020.

Suppose, however, that Lyft, Uber, Instacart, DoorDash, Grubhub, and other similarly structured companies didn’t have a large pool of independent contractors to drive, deliver groceries or meals, or perform other services. Say these companies had to hire full-time employees. Basically, their business models would fall apart. The primary utility they provide is brokering between those who are available to provide certain services and those who want to take advantage of those services.

But the nature of those services is unpredictable and subject to peaks and valleys. Many of these services are also very short-term in nature — maybe a 45-minute drive to the airport or an hour’s worth of grocery shopping and delivery. Large portions of the so-called gig economy are built around short-duration “service matchmaking” between an ever-changing pool of providers and those who need those services, at least at the moment.

Even longer-duration services fall under the gig economy. Going on a two-week summer vacation, but not taking the two family dogs? No problem: Use Rover or another pet-sitting service, and you can find someone to stay at your house and take care of Fido and Spot for the two weeks. After your vacation is over, you head back home and your pet sitter heads off to a new gig — or, you could just as accurately say, to a new client for their pet-sitting side hustle.

The key point is that side hustles and the gig economy are made for each other. In the United States and in much of the world, traditional employment and career notions are being turned on their heads. Companies are foregoing the idea of hiring full-time or even regular part-time employees in lieu of independent contractors who can come and go with little or no disruption to business operations. And many people are turning their backs on full-time jobs and careers in favor of less secure but more flexible, shorter-duration independent contractor assignments.