Working
for yourself could be the secret to happiness, a new report from Brighton
University’s Business School has suggested.
It said
the nation's freelancers are happier, primarily because they don't have a
permanent boss and so don’t have to face criticism or unfair demands. Nor do
they have to battle it out with colleagues to get ahead, and they actually take
home a fatter pay check.
Researchers
said that it was the ideal lifestyle, allowing people to work from home and a
variety of other locations, and work only for themselves.
"For
many, freelancing is emerging as the ideal lifestyle, especially in creative
and digital industries where people can work from any location, including home,
and which demand high levels of innovation," Dr Jonathan Sapsed, who
headed the report, told the Sunday Times.
In recent
years, the number of self-employed people in Britain has swelled, as the UK
leads western Europe for self-employment. In August it reached the highest
level since records began, with 4.6 million people or 15 per cent of the
workforce working for themselves, according to official figures.
Dr Sapsed said,
"What we found was a very positive picture where freelancers act more like
entrepreneurs. They are professional, business-like, good at self-promotion and
managing multiple brands."
Ed Vaizey,
the culture, communications and creative industries minister, said the findings
of the study showed the vitality of the freelance economy.
‘The
self-employed play a key role in driving the culture of innovation in the
creative and digital industries and are a vital part of Britain’s economic
growth,’ he said.
This
reinforces the view that we're headed towards a dramatically different economy
in which most workers will be independent contractors. Freelancers will work on
demand for whoever needs their services rather than for fixed periods of time
for a single employer.
As The
Economist describes, workers will be on a platform that matches them with
customers and provides verification, security and payment systems. This is the
world of Uber and will increasingly be the world of just about everything:
handyman services, cooking, laundry, shopping, scheduling, personal training,
coding, doctoring, lawyering, bossing and creating everything from television
ads to Ebola suits. As these services spread, they will create the
"on-demand economy" or the "platform economy."
Mary-Anne
Slaughter, CEO of The New American Foundation, believes The Economist missed a
deeper transformation, however: a set of forces that will reshape not only ways
of working but also patterns of consumption. The clue to this blind spot, she
says, lies in the following sentence: "The on-demand economy is unlikely
to be a happy experience for people who value stability more than flexibility."
For middle-aged professionals and everyone else who must combine breadwinning
and caregiving, flexibility is the Holy Grail.
Flexibility
allows lawyers, businesswomen, bankers, doctors and many other professionals to
continue to advance in their careers or at least stay in the game while being
the kind of parents they want to be. As a result, the economy will become
on-demand by the providers of services as much as by the consumers.
The most
important dimension of this flexibility is that it allows workers to have both
a job and time to do other things they care about. Now you can spend your money
on experiences, which psychologists have long known make us happier than
material things. Those experiences for young and old include sports, travel,
the arts and the ability to make all sorts of things. It will be an economy
that allows people time to both make a living and do what they most care about.
The lucky ones care about their work not just as a source of income but for its
own sake, as something that we enjoy doing and/or are deeply committed to as
part of our life's purpose. Even so, however, we are one-dimensional and boring
if we care only about work.
Thus,
working freelance can improve our quality of life whilst also ensuring a better
work life balance – and that has got to be a good thing.
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