Whether Zaino’s estimate of exactly when freelancers and independent professionals will outnumber regular employees proves correct, the general trend toward a rise in the number of independent workers is hard to deny. Online platforms connecting these pros to contract-based work are flourishing, and media chatter about the so-called “gig economy” is growing steadily louder. But is what is true in America also true abroad? Are other countries experiencing the same rise in the percentage of workers going independent?

A new piece of evidence suggests that freelancers are a growing part of the economy in the U.K. as well, at least when it comes to the small-business sector. Online labor platform PeoplePerHour.com recently polled 1,300 British small businesses about their use of freelance talent. The survey found:

• Eighty percent of responding businesses said freelancing had become more common in the UK small-business community over the past year.
• Thirty-two percent of respondents had started using freelancers for the first time in the past six months.
• Forty-one percent of respondents planned to increase freelance hiring over the next 12 months, compared with 16 percent who plan to hire more in-house staff.
• Thirty-three percent reported they now use freelancers on a weekly basis.

The release accompanying the survey also points out that the trend has been good for PeoplePerHour specifically, with total registered users doubling from 120,000 to more than 240,000 over the past year.

The technology changes that are enabling businesses in the U.S. to take advantage of independent workers are just as present in the U.K., as are strong economic pressures on businesses to cut costs and maintain agility, so the findings are hardly surprising. Nonetheless, the survey is interesting as a confirmation that these trends are affecting workers and organizations across the Atlantic as well.

Image courtesy of Flickr user C.G.P.Grey

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Millennials in the enterprise, part 1: strategies for supporting the new digital workforce
• Opportunities Abound as the “Rules of Work” are Broken
• Social first-quarter 2013: analysis and outlook

Recently, WebWorkerDaily phoned up Gene Zaino, a Net:Work 2011 speaker and CEO of MBO Partners which offers a package of back office services to independent workers they dub a “passport to independent work” — they’ll sort out your taxes, benefits, insurance and the like if you hand over a small percentage of billings — for a wide-ranging conversation about his predictions for independent work in the year ahead. (Check out his full predictions in infographic form here.) In his role at MBO, Zaino deals closely with a number of corporate HR and procurement departments, and his view of how quickly companies are coming to terms with the changing landscape of work varied significantly from the opinions of those who paint corporations as slow to adapt. For one, he defended HR against its critics, at least when it comes to taking advantage of independent talent:

HR organizations are very focused on the full-time employee segment of their business because that’s what they do, and they typically don’t deal with non-employees. Non-employees are paid through accounts payable or through procurement, so they tend to not be part of their system.

Now the more forward-thinking companies have decided to partner HR and procurement to figure out how to [handle independent workers], because HR gets upset when you hire an independent contractor who’s sitting next to or working alongside one of the full-time employees and they start talking. There’s a culture issue there, and I think the smarter companies have assembled teams or new positions, which have representation from HR, from procurement and from legal, and they put together a strategy and make [independent work] one other component of how they get work done.

And outside the boundaries of HR, Zaino insists, in the last few years, companies are really starting to grasp the benefits of hiring independent workers, as well as how to maximize their value while minimizing the compliance risks of nimble hiring.

I’ve seen tremendous change. Today most Fortune 500 companies have an actual position – sometimes it resides in HR, sometimes it resides in their procurement department, sometimes it’s a new department. It always has someone from legal involved because it’s generally a compliance issue. But they generally have someone that manages their non-employee labor and in more and more companies there’s much more publicity, much more education, much more awareness.

Most recently in 2011, for the first time, I’ve even seen public companies in their annual reports start talking about how many independent workers they have as compared to employees. Caterpillar is one where they actually boasted because they consider that a strategic advantage to be able to be nimble in terms of their cost structure. So there has absolutely been a dramatic increase in education on the corporate side that has taken about ten years to happen, but it’s prominent today.

As Zaino points out, ruthless economic realities are pushing companies to be equally ruthless about cutting costs and maintaining flexibility, but he also explains that a vigorous compliance drive by tax officials partly explains why companies are getting more savvy about managing their independent workers.

“There’s a huge enforcement effort to reclassify people as employees that companies are paying as contractors,” he says. “Today there are 14 new bills pending that will increase penalties for companies that try to engage independent workers who would otherwise be classified as employees, and the test for being an employee versus an independent contractor is extremely gray. It’s about behavior. It’s about control. It’s really easy for the state tax, the IRS, the Department of Homeland Security or the Department of Labor to come in and say: ‘You look and walk and talk like an employee, so we’re going to call you an employee and we’re going to give a big fine to the place where you’re working because that’s the easier way for us to go collect a lot of money.’”

Motivated by both the carrot of a more agile workforce and the stick of stiff government fines, it seems even the slowest moving organizational behemoths are learning to manage the exploding number of independent workers. (Zaino predicted independent workers will be a majority of workforce by 2020 at Net:Work.)

In your experience, are big companies dragging their heels or quickly coming to terms with the realities of the changing workforce?

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• How HR can make the case for workforce analytics
• Personal tools lead to practical business
• Millennials in the enterprise, part 1: strategies for supporting the new digital workforce