Steve Hatfield

The Singular Role of Public Pension Funds in Corporate Governance Board of Directors, Corporate governance, ESG, Public Pension More from: Jeff Schwartz, Jill Fisch Jill E. Fisch is the Saul A. Fox Distinguished Professor of Business Law at the University of Pennsylvania Carey Law School, and Jeff Schwartz is the Hugh B. Brown Presidential Professor of Law at the University of Utah S.J. Quinney College of Law. This post is based on his recent article, forthcoming in the Texas Law Review.

Hours worked. Time on task. Product produced. Revenue per employee. For more than a century, organizations have relied on productivity metrics like these since they emerged during the Industrial Revolution as leading practices to improve and measure organizational productivity. It was a good system for the working culture of the era, when mass production and automation made work a commodity and drove the creation of standardized processes. But the workplace has evolved.

In the third annual MIT SMR—Deloitte Future of the Workforce global study, roughly half of the organizations surveyed reported that at least 30% of their work was produced by external workers.1 In some sectors—like the tech industry—it’s not uncommon for contingent workers to make up 40% to 50% of an organization’s workforce.2 What does this growing reliance on external contributors—long- and short-term contractors, gig workers, partners, and technologies—mean for management models?