#HRTechChat: Ray Walker on Navigating Contingent Workforce Compliance and the Future of Work

Posted on by

In today’s workforce landscape, Ray Walker stands out as a leading expert in contingent workforce compliance. A seasoned professional who ensures compliance with both general and immigration laws, Walker’s primary focus is maintaining business integrity while adhering to complex regulations.


Contingent workers, defined as non-standard, off-payroll employees engaged on a project basis, have become a significant part of the labor market, constituting one-fifth of the UK labor market. Walker categorizes contemporary workers into three main types: traditional full-time employees, gig workers, and professional service providers. Each group faces unique legislative challenges, especially in a globalized economy where misclassification and multi-jurisdictional issues are common.


Walker’s expertise is precious in navigating these complexities, ensuring businesses remain compliant without hindering operational efficiency. His insights into the future of work emphasize the need for companies and workers to adapt to decentralized, technology-driven models, ensuring success in this dynamic environment.

Our #HRTechChat Series is also available as a podcast on the following platforms:

See a service missing that you use? Let our team know by emailing research@3SixtyInsights.com.

Transcript:

Dylan Teggart 00:00
Hey everyone. This is Dylan Taggart, here for another 3Sixty Insight #HRTechChat. I’m here with Ray Walker. Ray is a contingent workforce compliance expert, and He’s based in the UK. Hey, Ray, thanks for joining me today.

Ray Walker 00:27
Hi Dylan, thanks for the invite.

Dylan Teggart 00:29
just so everyone knows. Ray is the always making sure people are staying in compliance, and making sure businesses stay in compliance with their contingent workforce. I guess the first question right off the bat for you, Ray is, how would you best describe a contingent worker? Because I feel like this may not be a term everyone’s familiar with.

Ray Walker 00:50
Yeah, no, it’s a really good question. If you go around into different countries, you come across a lot of different terms with regards it’s good to sort of clarify contingent worker is is often called a non standard employee. In the UK, it’s getting known as an off payroll. It effectively is someone who you’re not engaging on a full time, traditional employed basis. They can work on single gigs. They might be working on programs or projects that are sort of lasting a little bit longer than that, and they may come back for repeat business on a number of occasions. So it’s quite a wide spectrum of what they might be, but those who are not permanent employees of your workforce,

Dylan Teggart 01:36
interesting. So So Ian, you mentioned project based and I think everyone kind of is becoming more familiar now with like the fractional or gig economy or contingent work economy. For someone like you who’s really steeped in it, what would you say is kind of the landscape in 2024 for contingent work?

Ray Walker 02:01
I think we’re in a I think we’re in a really interesting time. There’s been a fairly decent growth over the last 10 years of contingent work. Around about 1/5 of the workforce is now contingent workers. As I say, that’s grown quite substantially over the last 10 years. Where we sit now. Post pandemic, there’s a lot more people who are sort of work start to work remotely, and from that, they’ve then sort of started to see the benefits of perhaps going and having either a side hustle or having turning there, sort of like becoming a full time contract or freelancer or gig worker, whichever term you want to go with. So where we see it now is we see a market that’s growing, moving in a really big direction, but we also see that the legal landslide escape is is still trying to catch up, and there’s a battle there between making sure that things are being managed in accordance with either the live in tax departments or the labor laws, or even sort of immigration and cross border that needs to be brought into consideration, because things are becoming a lot more global. So it’s it’s a very interesting market to be in. There’s a lot sort of new entrance into it. There’s a lot of new situations and and technologies are continuing to evolve and come in and sort of try and help and push this even more. So, yeah, having been here for this for a long time, I see the future being probably the most exciting it’s ever been

Dylan Teggart 03:36
interesting and and where do you fit into all that? Like, how would you say, how would you best describe your role to someone and kind of or your day to day or week to week looks like?

Ray Walker 03:48
Yeah, sure, so I effectively make sure that everybody sticks within the rules. And the rules is a really big term, but it applies to the circumstance of that environment. So if we’re looking at, if I’m working directly with an enterprise client who’s a user of contingent workers, the rules might be a case of making sure that they’re not misclassifying the worker as either an employee or an independent contractor. They might also be considering about, if they’re trying to work with someone overseas, how do they make sure they engage them in the correct way? Are we talking about length of time if I’m looking and working with the actual workers themselves? Again, how many gigs are they doing? How many sort of projects? How long are their projects? Are they what’s what’s their intention? Are they saying, I’m quite happy to be an employee. We don’t need to look at the independent contractor part that takes away challenges around misclassification, but working as an employee in that arena, you’ve got the Employment Rights side of that, and then obviously the. Correct taxes and deductions that need to be taken. And if you’re multi jurisdictional, which, which jurisdiction has a claim on those? Is it? Is it some? Is it all? Is it just one part of it? So my part is to literally, first and foremost, to understand the rules of the environment, understand the requirement, and then go and apply those and make sure that there’s process and procedure around it, to make sure that we haven’t overstepped anything. There are times then where I might be working with clients who will say, I know the rules, but I don’t necessarily fit as a business inside those rules. At the present time, what do we need to do to adjust? How do we need to get to fit within those rules, and it’s therefore, it’s trying to work and guide and push people in the right direction as to what they need to do. Sometimes it’s not possible, and that’s a big understanding, because people want to necessarily, sometimes work with people, and you can’t work in the way they want to, but at the very least, I can turn the light on and show them what they need to do. And then it’s up to them as to whether they can or want to actually make any changes. Often I come across this that the clients that I work with, their clients, have got requirements, and so whilst my client might want to sort of make those changes, they can’t, because of the requirements that their clients actually put in upon them as well. So again, it’s understanding all of that, sort of like how all of the dominoes are falling and how they’re connecting all that together, and putting that within the in the actual practice of the rules at that point in time for that specific set scenario. Quite complicated, but you know, as I say, that’s probably in a nutshell, that’s what I need to do, take something that’s complicated and put it into sensible, easy speech so that people can understand it and work with

Dylan Teggart 06:44
it. Yeah, that can be a massive task. It it’s definitely in the US, and maybe, and I’d like to shed some light on how it is in the UK, in the US, often there’s the issue of, like, federal, state, city or, you know, you know, I guess you could say jurisdictional compliance you have to deal with within the federal system of the US. Is it just, is it similar there, where you have to kind of balance all those simultaneously as well? And then, I guess post Brexit, maybe you don’t have to deal with the EU legislation anymore, but you may also have workers coming in from other countries in Europe as well. They have to factor in all that compliance, I’m assuming,

Ray Walker 07:30
so it’s similar and then distinctly different. So we don’t have the multi jurisdictional elements in the UK, because you’ve just got one government and in fact, you only have one government agency. So in the US, you’ve got multiple government agencies. As you say, it might be from a city perspective, a state perspective or a federal perspective. So from an administrative perspective, it’s a lot easier in the UK. However, that doesn’t mean that they’ve sold all of the problems in in how to, sort of like work out where the landscape is. There’s a, I think, a special status that I think I’ve only come across in the UK, where, if we look at the US and the UK as an equivalent, the US has an independent contractor, and everybody else is an employee. What you have in the UK is they have, like a middle ground, but you have your independent contractors. You have your employees, and then you have what’s been termed in a number of different ways. Some someone called them a dependent contractor, but their legal term is that of a worker, and that’s someone who’s effectively employed, but on a contract basis, and working at a site and working for a client who isn’t their employer, so they’re being seconded out all the time, but on sort of like a short term project, there’s a different legal status, and people get different rights according to what their status may be. So we have to be conscious of that. We have to be aware of that there’s changes afoot in the UK political landscape, and one of the things that they’re looking at is that actual classification and the rights that workers get to whether they get day one rights, or whether they’re getting, in some cases, they don’t get these rights and some rights until they’re two years into an event. And so that means contractors never get them, because they’re not going to be a contractor, they’re going to be in a contingent space if they’re doing something for more than two years. So we have to look at that. If you look at them post Brexit, there are changes, but not massive, sweeping changes. Before Brexit, you still had to look at check to ensure somebody had the right to work. You now have to do that, but the right to work as has taken on a slightly different faiths. So now it’s if you’ve got a British passport, or if you’ve got the freedom of movement before Brexit. So if you’ve got European passport, and there’s certain things the government put in place to help, sort of like work out whether you’ve got that in play, and then after that, anybody else is effectively, it’s a no. They need to be turning up with some kind of work. I mean, so it’s, it’s not, I don’t say the landscape isn’t massively different. It’s just possibly the the library of passports that you could have looked at, as we’ve narrowed down to sort of like either a passport or an EU sort of share code, as they call

Dylan Teggart 10:15
it. And I know you because for everyone’s full disclosure, Ray and I have spoken before, and in our previous talk, he you did mention that misclassification of work is a big issue, and people are usually very close to being out of compliance. But you also mentioned that part of the reason is that the law is just not really caught up to the landscape work. Could you give me a bit of a Could you give us a bit of an example of what that would kind of look like in your day to day, and how and when, where the law is kind of lagging behind?

Ray Walker 10:54
Yeah, I think that UK is a really good example. As I said, there’s a free classifications of different types of workers. You know, the traditional employees, the independent, self employed ones, and then the legal worker. That’s something that’s really was has been in place for a few years now, but that was when contingent workers were of a real fraction of the actual workforce, as I say they’re around. They’re actually more than 1/5 of the UK workforce now. So it’s taken on a lot of people who are sitting within that and now caught up into this. So when, when it was not really having a big impact, then perhaps people didn’t really care too much. It didn’t have such a voice. But now it’s got a bigger voice within because people are looking at saying, Well, I’m not getting the rights I should do. There’s, there’s actually a status within the UK where you can be employed for tax purposes, but at the same time not employed for state for employment rights purposes. So you pay the same employment taxes as you would if you as an employee, but you have no rights whatsoever, and it’s a great example of showing how it’s misaligned with where, with what people expect or want we all believe. You know, if we’re an employee, the biggest benefit about being an employee is the protections you get around that, whether that’s employment rights or whether that’s actual employment benefits, or whatever it may be, you’re getting some kind of add on. And we understand, and we expect, if we’re going to go self employed, want to be an independent contractor, that’s fine. We’re probably going to earn more money, because that’s, again, why that works that way. You’re going to get your unit price is going to go up, but your understanding, you’ve got to look after yourself, you’re going to pay what you need to pay for health insurance, and any of those sorts of things. You hit that middle ground in the UK, you’re suddenly getting the same sort of money as what you get if you was employed, but with zero rights. And that’s where the legislation has to catch up. That’s where things have got to speed up. If I flip that and take that into the US, the misclassification risk there comes again, down to employment rights, because the Department of Labor, and what have you, the IRS, is obviously looking at from a tax perspective, but the Department of Labor is looking at and going, we need to make sure that everybody’s being paid the correct rate of pay. We don’t want people to be sort of underpaid. We want to make sure they get an overtime and also all of those sorts of statutory benefits. But there’s a lot of people that are now working in the independent contractor space and doing it out of choice. They’re doing it. They might be working in sort of the lower value, low earning ones as a side hustle. They might be working in something that’s a bit more they’ve turned their sort of full time job into an independent contractor role, but they want to take this on, and they’re happy and want to be an independent contractor. But sometimes that choice is taken out of their hands, because the different government agents come in and go, Well, we actually think the way you’re engaging, you should be a w2 employee, and you go and again, it needs to sort of catch up into the there should be, in my opinion, I think you’ve got two different types of independent contractors, and I think there should be a way of a different way of handling each one. The first one is what I will term the professional services contractor. They’re the one who’s, you know that they’re earning a fairly high level of money, they’re highly educated, is highly skilled, and they have no issues with regards the rights or the remuneration being put against them, because they know if there’s any challenges to what they’re doing, they’ll walk away from that current assignment and find another one quite quickly. Those ones, I don’t think, need protection. Those are the ones that are currently caught up in a protection but stifles their actual opportunities because of being caught in that if we flip it and go to the more transactional sort of, your Uber, your Lyft and those type of workers, I firmly believe they need protections and they need to be looked after, and those are the ones. Again, it’s less of a highly skilled task that you’re bringing in that’s where we need. To make sure the legislation’s in the right place, because we’ve always had traditional employed or self employed. Legislation’s been designed to support those two. It’s not had this middle ground part of the what if you’re personally choosing to be self employed, but working on that sort of spectrum of either professional services or low value gig. That’s where legislation has got to catch up. That’s where it needs to work out what it does for me, if I had the perfect world, you’d have two definitions of contingent workers, one sitting in the professional services, and whether you put that as a value, like literally a day rate that they were earning, and anything above that puts them into that is to be determined. But if you ran with that, you then legislate for the ones that need the protections down the bottom, and allowing, then for the entrepreneurial spirit of the professional services ones to go on and thrive and actually generate a lot more business in

Dylan Teggart 16:01
DC. Do think the digital landscape has made it harder or easier in this in this sense, because there are way more ways to make money, not just you know, in person, you know, doing a project in person, in your town, in your city, or whatever. What have you, within an hour from you, it’s now possible to sit at home, work for someone in a different country or across the country. Well simultaneously, maybe after that, you go, do you know a job locally in person? How do you feel like the digital as a digital landscape made it hard, harder or easier for someone like you to stay in compliance, because the I obviously the checks and balances have increased because there’s a bit more of like a paper trail, like a digital paper trail. But has it complicated things more in the sense the sources of information or sources of data coming to you is now just doubled or tripled.

Ray Walker 17:05
Yeah, the digital age is definitely the fire underneath this, and turned it from being a much smaller thing to what it is today, and it’ll only get bigger because of that, because so many people have got an opportunity to earn money from this. My son told me a short while ago, he’s obviously based in the UK. He’s actually earned money from from a gaming site. So he’s actually had to complete a wa Ben, which is a US tax form, so he can actually get paid from a company in the US because of him going onto one of these platforms and actually designing something. And it just shows you, you know, that’s, that’s a 19 year old boy. Oh, man. Sorry, really, but who’s gone and tripped an overseas tax regime because of a digital platform that he’s working on? So the digital side of things has changed everything. It’s made it now possible. What does that mean from a reporting perspective? As you say, there’s a paper trial there. So it’s a lot easier now to audit and check and find things, but the challenge is because now the the the audience involved in it is so much larger. It’s actually harder now to necessarily find the individuals within there. So your chance of being found is a lot slimmer. But once you’re found and the audit trials on it, it’s going to be quite comprehensive. Now, the reason why I mentioned that is, you’re not trying to hide anything, but when you’re trying, if you’re being from a compliance perspective, and you’re working with people, it’s not uncommon for me to get the Yeah, but there must be a workaround. There must be a way of we can handle it this way or that way. So you get a lot more challenges than perhaps there used to be against what you’d say and what you do, and because then you’re looking at so many different jurisdictions, at times, your awareness or your knowledge of what’s going on and what you might trip and what you might do has to become broader. So yeah, it’s definitely made it more challenging. I’m a bit of a crazy person. I find that fun. So for me, it’s quite interesting. I’m having to learn about lots of different locations and how they operate and how that might influence and interact with whoever I’m servicing at that point in time. But yeah, it’s it’s not going to get any easier. There’s no way it’s going to get any easier. The part now is down to, as I say, the people writing the laws and what have you trying to catch up to that, to sort of try and control it in the right way.

Dylan Teggart 19:34
And do you think potentially, one method of controlling it could be kind of moving towards what you mentioned in one of our previous conversations, the common reporting standards that they have in the EU. Could that be something that obviously it’s going to be impossible to get the entire world on the same page by next week, but let’s say moving forward, countries that maybe interact with each other more like, you know, Europe, like, not you’re obviously Europe as a country, but they. EU, the UK, and, let’s say Canada, and or all of North America. You could say, is it, do you think it’s, do you maybe envision a world where all of those are kind of on a common reporting standards like they have in Europe? Or is that the most efficient way, or not so much? Yeah.

Ray Walker 20:17
So if I had a bit of detail for anybody on the Common Reporting Standards. Actually, I checked this, there’s now over 125 countries worldwide who signed up to the Common Reporting Standards, and that’s all effectively around the financial services, making sure people have got entities or businesses overseas. They can those countries can report to one another, and they tie in, and they were actually came from the US original version, which is FATCA, and that came in, again, it’s from financial services, and the common report standards came after that, but that’s a great example of showing 125 countries who have signed up, who are now saying we’re going to basically build our financial services industry on a common standard, so that we can transfer that information, and we agree, we come together and report that information around to one another, so it shows that things can align, but it’s then a question of what you want to align on that. So immigration something that people are never going to align to they’ll always run to their own immigration. The requirements of people wanting to go to the US, for instance, is always going to be, you know, the demand is going to be much greater, higher than the supply. Whereas, if you go into even in countries in in Europe, you can go into like Greece, the the demand is much lower than the supply. So even an EU country itself is sort of like a vast differences. So they’re never going to align on immigration. But if it comes around to then the how you control that, if you’ve got somebody working in one site place, and taxes being paid in another, how you do that? Because that’s just business transactions that’s not been necessarily being seen through the bank. That’s where an advancement of the Common Reporting Standards, or FACA, can actually step up to actually improve that. And it’s shown that it can happen. Those are definitely the advances that are needed on a global scale to try and simplify the audit trail. Because the audit trail is there, it’s just difficult to find. If you’ve got something that’s more aligned on more countries, then you can make it easier. So it’s not sort of, I mean, you go into Australia and you work on something in Australia, and it’s absolutely nothing like you’ve seen in the US or Europe, in the way that they run their business, the terms the systems that they’re using, nothing at all like it. And that’s, you know, if you can unify some of those things around the world, you can definitely make it easier.

Dylan Teggart 22:49
Yeah, it would make it all a lot more seamless. Which kind of leads me to my next question is, you know, obviously this change in work didn’t just happen overnight, you know, it kind of began in, you know, 2030, years ago, and say, we started shifting more towards this type of work. Do you think this is potentially the natural evolution of work for people, like full time work, in the sense where you work for one big company or a company, and that’s who you work for. Obviously, that’s already changed in just our life, not our lifetime, but in the last 100 years, like from our grandparents to us, or, you know, I’m sure the next generations. You know, we’re no longer staying at a company for 3040, or your entire career. It’s very rare these days, to the point where now we’re at the point where maybe you stay at a company for a couple of years, or maybe you never work for a company full time ever. Do you think that? Do you think the natural evolution of this is going to be a world where no one really has traditional full time jobs anymore? Do you think that we’re the essentially, the policy is going to have to or, like just financial institutions and in tracking mechanisms are going to have to adjust to just accept that that is the new norm in the West, at the very least, you know, sure, outside of the West, it might be different, but it does seem like it’s an unstoppable trend.

Ray Walker 24:22
I think you’re right. I think it is an unstoppable trend. And if you take it back, and if you go to the Industrial Revolution, is what dragged everybody into the same workplace, your Monday to Friday working for the same employer, happened then, because it all got centralized. You’re now going through the technology revolution where it’s all being decentralized, and people can work in whichever location, as long as they’ve got access to power and as long as they’ve got some kind of internet, and Elon Musk has solved that problem for us, then you can go and work from anywhere. So and people, as you say. It’s there. It’s really interesting to talk to people who are just starting off their careers, and they’ve very much got that mindset, I don’t necessarily want to work for anybody. I don’t want to be beholden to an employer. And the there’s the ability to do that now. They’ve got that ability to go and work for who they want, when they want, however they want, and the nine to five, it’s not dead. I’m not trying to say that, but I think it’d be very interesting to see where we are 20 years from now, because there’s a big challenge as to how, how much of the workforce is doing, you know, the nine to five anymore, and how much are doing, you know, their own sort of ways of doing it. As I say, We’re over 1/5 of the workforce is contingent. In the contingent space. Now there’s an expectation that will double by 2050, I think, is sort of the times that they’re throwing at that. So that’s pushing, that’s making big changes. So it’s gonna happen. It’s an unstoppable force. The only question is, how long it takes to happen, and in the journey that you go on to get there as well, and how you then make sure that again, from a compliance perspective, I think there’s going to be a lot of elements associated to it. I regularly speak to clients who are saying, We’ve got workers who are now based in X, Y and Z country. We’ve got to engage with them. Tell me how we solve the problem. Who’s not about it’s now we have to solve the problem. It’s not an option not to solve the problem. They need those workers because of what they’ve got. And it just shows that the power is moving, definitely moving towards the worker more than it was once on the employer. So I think it’s a very interesting time we’re in.

Dylan Teggart 26:41
Yeah, and on that, you know, employee, employer, kind of dynamic that is going to exist within all these changes, you know, previously, you know, in our previous talk, you’d mentioned that they’re, you know, reducing a permanent workforce for a company, let’s say, by 50% could make them look more efficient, which was kind of a smoke and mirrors move a little bit, because they ultimately, they ended up hiring a lot of contingent or part time workers or just contract workers. How did, how did companies kind of handle this, from kind of just operating, operating cost, operating expenses, how do they how should they look to the future to handle all this and then simultaneously, for the person entering the workforce or the person that’s been in the workforce for a really long time and doesn’t really know how to handle all this? What kind of advice would you give to those two parties?

Ray Walker 27:39
Yeah, I mean as to how to handle this, I spoke to someone recently who set up a company, and they’ve got, I think, three permanent employees, and the other three or 400 workers they’re working for are on the bench. They literally tap into them whenever their clients want, and that’s their business model. And they’ve just taken some really good funding from somebody who likes that, and they can turn the tap on and off according to what they want. So those type of business models are already there. That’s where it’s already settled. If you’re looking at, how does a company best embrace the contingent space, or what’s the best ones for it, they have to be saying they have to change. They can’t go and be the business that it was so many years ago, be that two years, five years, 10 years. It can’t be that same business. If they want to embrace and take on the contingent revolution, they’ve got to sit back and go, Okay, we’ve got to treat these like they’re independent of our business. They can’t work with them as their employees and have all of those, those old, historic controls if they don’t. And the companies that that thrive in that have changed or will change, the companies that don’t thrive and struggle are the ones that go, no, no, no, we want to be in control of this. That’s ultimately what they’re saying. They’ve said in various different guises, but they want to be in control of everything. So let’s say that’s the best thing you can get from anybody on this. If you want to go and embrace it, you’ve got to change. You’ve got to come up with something different. It’s definitely here to stay, in my opinion, it’s just whether you want to be part of that. If you’re somebody who’s worked, if you’re a new I think new workers can embrace this a lot easier than somebody who’s perhaps got, you know, a couple of decades worth of traditional working experience. The new workers is new to them. This is like, Yeah, this is what I want to do. And it’s quite a it’s quite aligned with with their psyche. There’s someone who’s already been sort of working for an employer that might be multiple employers, but as used to doing that employer employee relationship jumping away from that is a new is a new thing that they’ve got to adapt to. And but it means, again, the change there is breaking away from the nine to five, the plus point about working nine to five, and I struggle to find anyone who works nine to five, but if we use it as a concept, at least it. Means you’ve got a start date, a start time and a finish time when you start working in the contingent side of things. There is no real defined start and finish time, but that means that you can also spend whatever time you want during the day, doing whatever you want to do, but you might be sitting under a desk lamp at 11 o’clock at night finishing off a project that you’ve got to do. So you’ve got to get used to that side of things. It’s not a defined start and defined end. It’s now just random and whatever suits your lifestyle. But that’s that’s probably one of the things that’s really appealing to people who want to go into that lifestyle, because it allows them. And covid showed a lot of this, you can live your life without having to go and commute for many miles or many hours, and you can carry on doing your work. You can do whatever needs that your family demands put upon you, and you can still do your job. And yeah, you may well be working at eight o’clock at night, but that’s after you’ve sort of done everything you need to do with your kids, and they’re settled down, and you’re sort of like in the right space. So the probably the key to all of this, to embrace the future, to adapt and go into the future, don’t try to use the models that’s been used in the past. There’s got to be a change in models.

Dylan Teggart 31:18
That’s, yeah, that’s a great way to put it, to embrace the future. Don’t try to use the models of the past. Speaking of embracing the future, have you had interaction with some companies or systems or vendors that are really kind of at the tip of the spear, or really grasping this, these changes well, and that you’ve worked with and that really handle these kind of compliance issues, or contingent workforce issues? Well, yeah,

Ray Walker 31:49
apart from the one that I just said, which I think is amazing, you know, free, permanent employees, the rest are just, you know, contingents. The other good example I come across is a client that we addressed, and they were, you know, we’ve got people who we must have in the contingent side of things. They’ve got to be self employed. Tell us what we need to do. We’ll adapt, we’ll change. We’ll do what’s needed. And that’s exactly what we was able to do. So we was able to tell them what they needed to adapt and change. But what we also did is then put it into context for them, because a lot of people often look at this as a as a one size fits all, and I don’t think the the workforce of today in any company is now a one size fits all. You’ve got traditional employees that will stay traditional. You’ve got contractors who need to be employed because of the the way you want to engage with them, and then you’ve got workers who can be self employed, the independent contractors. What you have to do is to partition your workforce. In my mind, before you go and put any strategic changes, partition the workforce and work out the ones that are going to sit in which camps so you’re then only addressing if you’re looking at making change to your business to bring on the independent contractor element, you’re only looking at a portion of the business, not all of it, and you’re not then making big changes for everything, which is a difficult to do, but what carries, perhaps a level of risk you don’t need to carry. And if you’re trying to take that internally as a program and trying to get some internal adoption onto that, if you say to them, it’s actually only say 25% of the business, not 100% it becomes a lot easier for internal adoption to happen in doing that. So again, it’s that same thing, look and plan and understand and work out what is relevant and what’s what’s out of scope. Because if it’s out of scope, great, leave it as it is. There’s no changes. Everybody’s happy with that. Nobody wants any sort of new changes to go into business. It’s easy to do, but if you want need to adopt and bring on stuff, then you’ve got it into scope and you’ve got it at a scale that’s perhaps more manageable than it was before.

Dylan Teggart 33:53
Interesting, all of some very great points and Ray, I want to thank you so much for joining me today. It’s been a great discussion, and, yeah, I know, while the feature of work for some people, even for myself, who, like, kind of was, you know, told growing up, this is kind of how work works, the landscape ahead can be a little scary, but it’s I liked the idea that it does give you a lot of freedom, and I think a lot of people appreciate that, and that, you know, work is a has changing definitions. And thank you so much for the insights on how to handle it. And if anyone wants to reach out to you, for if they have any questions, and if they want to reach to you directly, what’s the best way for them to do that?

Ray Walker 34:43
Best way is fine on LinkedIn, which is, I’m under the handle of Ray C Walker. I think you find if you look on LinkedIn, so it’s nice and easy to find. If you can’t, you can always use my work email address, which is a nice, easy one, which is Ray at work, sun.com,

Dylan Teggart 34:57
awesome. Well, Ray, thank you again and it’s been great speaking with you.

Share your comments: