Tough times call for better strategising – as the global economic downturn nudged businesses to get prudent with their budgets and conserve cash, companies variablised their frontline workforce costs and hired more gig workers, showed a frontline index report by human capital SaaS platform BetterPlace.

While gig jobs have continued to grow stronger, (permanent) frontline jobs have not grown so much… the end of FY22 and beginning of FY23 showed positive growth in demand but slowly, employers reduced vacancies due to various reasons like slowdown in business, business losses, over-hiring, cost of hiring etc… most enterprises are looking to variablise their workforce cost by moving to a gig model of workforce management,” the report said.

The total number of new frontline jobs decreased to 6.6 million in FY23 from 8 million in FY22, registering a decline of 17.5%. “E-commerce was the highest contributor to frontline worker employment in FY22 but has reduced significantly in FY23. The dominance of the e-commerce sector has been replaced by the logistics and mobility and IFM (integrated facility management) & IT sectors, which together contribute to more than 61% of the new jobs created,” according to the report. E-commerce, however, continued to employ more women frontline workers.

The increasing gigification of workforce, though, has enabled more participation of women. “In sectors like retail and warehousing, companies are looking to hire more women gig workers as hiring women results in better efficiency. Attrition in men is higher than in women. Besides, companies are focusing on ESG (environmental, social and governance) goals,” Pravin Agarwala, co-founder and group CEO at BetterPlace told TOI.

Agarwala expects variablisation of workforce to increase going ahead. E-commerce firm Myntra, for instance, recently said that it will ramp up hiring of temporary women workers across its supply chain and contact centres this festive season. In terms of pay scale though, women lagged.