Marleen Deleu Bridging the Gap Between Freelancers and Organizations

Marleen Deleu

Nigel Rawlins: Welcome Marleen to the Wisepreneurs podcast. Could you tell us something about yourself and where you're from?

Marleen Deleu: Of course, thank you for inviting me, Nigel, it's an honor to be on the show. My name is Marleen Deleu and I'm living in Belgium, about 80 kilometers from Brussels, our capital. I live here with my husband, we have two wonderful children and one grandson. He's two years and a half and he's our darling, of course, very much spoiled.

I've been trained as a teacher and I've been working as a teacher for three years. But in those days, and we're talking about the early eighties, there was not much work for a teacher. So I looked for another job where I could work with people and share my knowledge. That was still both my drivers in my professional life.

Don't put me in a room on my own with nobody around me doing some administrative work. I go crazy. So I really need people around me and I love to make people grow and share my knowledge, my insights, my expertise with them. So, I found that at Ronstadt. Ronstadt is a temporary agency company.

In those days, we're talking about 86, 87, they were only in the Netherlands and in Belgium and not that big. A few years later they became world leader. They're still the number one in the world of work of HR staffing services, and it was really a great adventure to work with them.

So you have people in all directions when you're working for a staffing agency. Your colleagues, your clients, your temp agents, your temp staffing person. So it's, it's really people in all directions and it was a great time. I learned a lot. I've been working for them for 26 years and then I decided in 2013 to quit and to start my own company.

And I first started as a freelancer to do consultancy work for major companies here in Belgium. And then I met Hugo-Jan Ruts, who's somebody from the Netherlands who already had a knowledge platform, an online knowledge platform, on new ways of working, new ways of organizing work.

And he was looking for someone in Belgium, start the same thing, same concept as he had in the Netherlands. And so that was really great. All my expertise from 26 years at Randstad and sharing this knowledge and this insights via an online knowledge platform, I've never. had any thought of doing that on my own, but I was like, wow, this is it.

And so here we are, almost seven years ago, we launched NextConomy in Belgium. And, yeah, it's great. It's fun every day. It's doing what I love every day. So it's really great doing that.

Nigel Rawlins: So it's called The Next Economy.

Marleen Deleu: Nextconomy. Yes, that's the name of our online knowledge platform and we share news, insights, best practices on evolving world of work and especially the world of flexible work. Because you see on one side, individuals looking for new ways of working. They want to become independently.

Take their own career in their hands and be self guiding in that. So a lot of people start working as a freelancer, but they are not well prepared, so we share information on how to become a more professional freelancer. And on the other hand, you have organizations looking for more flexible, more agile ways of organizing work, and so they're looking for freelancers.

So it's really, Ying and Yang, they find each other. But also on the organizations, the buyer side, it's very unprofessional. It's not well organized. And not to say it's not organized. It's all very organic. And so, it's really a mess, and we share insights and best practices in how to organize flexible labor in an organization in a more professional way.

Nigel Rawlins: That sounds fantastic. Well, let's have a little talk about why are people wanting to become freelancers Is there a particular pattern or an age group that's doing that? Can you tell us something about that?

Marleen Deleu: That's a good question. Why people want to become a freelancer? There's been multiple studies in all countries, and they all have the same result. Most people really want to follow their passion and to say, this is what I love to do, but my boss or whatever other reason is keeping me from really following my passion and really allowing me to follow my convictions, my belief in an idea.

And so they really start out of passion. And that's already where it goes wrong because starting as a freelancer is also starting in an enterprise. And so you need a business plan and you really need to think about who's your target audience, how you're going to make money.

And so, if you start really just following your passion, we see that a lot of people forget to prepare and not start a business. and just a hobby which doesn't bring you a lot of money. Is there a difference? Yes. There is a difference in age group. What we see over the years is that more and more young people are starting as a freelancer.

And that's in the beginning I was really surprised by that. Certainly for technology, what they learn, what they study in school and university is, of course, the latest developments in technology. And that's where the demand in organizations is. And, it's the more senior profiles who lack this knowledge, certainly for ICT or engineering profiles, it's the youngsters who have the knowledge and they're in demand in the labor market. So they take hardly any risk if they start as a freelancer instead of starting as an employee on the payroll in an organization. So you see a shift in age, it used to be only the senior profiles, and it's the senior profiles, of course, but it's also very young, students even during their studies already starting to freelance.

Nigel Rawlins: I spoke to Matthew Dorling, early in the podcast and they're doing a lot of work in the universities to teach the students how to do freelancing.

Marleen Deleu: Absolutely.

Nigel Rawlins: It's really quite interesting. I know that when I finished, my high school before I did some study that I had lots of job opportunities because that was way back in 1974.

You could walk into four or five jobs. They all said, look, just turn up and we'll give you a job.

You mentioned ICT and I guess engineering as the talent, but what other talent areas are students who've graduated able to use in freelancing, do you think?

Marleen Deleu: Anything. There is no such thing as the freelancer. It's all domains. You see it in marketing, HR, procurement. It's really everything. Copywriters, of course, journalists. They've been there as a freelance base for years already, but all these different jobs are now more and more attractive for people to start freelancing.

On the other hand, it's not so that, and certainly not in Belgium, we're a pretty conservative country with a lot of strong social security systems. So people are very well protected and they have the feeling they lose a lot when they start on an independent base.

It's not that everybody is starting to freelance. That's not the case, but it's a growing number. The number of people that start freelancing grows every year between six and nine percent. So that's that's quite a large number.

Nigel Rawlins: Well, one of the things I was thinking there about, say young students who've just graduated from university coming in, they're not going to have a lot of experience, compared to say somebody who's worked in the industry for 10 or 15 years, for example, a copywriter or a marketing person. So how do the young ones get the experience do you think?

Marleen Deleu: Well, they can start working as a student, for instance. And, they do these side gigs. I see a lot of them, also, very good in networking and collaborating with other people. There's so much that you need to know, which makes it impossible for a person to know everything.

And so you organize your own network and you're looking for people with complementary skills and expertise, and you know, 1 plus 1 is 3. And so if you can work together in a kind of ecosystems, then you can do anything. So people are really getting more and more used to thinking in ecosystems and collaborating.

When I was entering the labor market, the others were your competitors and you didn't share anything. And you really have to, people turn that around, and I think it's a very good evolution. Yeah, you join forces and you enforce each other. You share knowledge and together you solve problems of your client. So that's really great expertise.

I have to agree there. I know that when I started out, I actually started out as a teacher for about 16 years before I quit, which was about 25 years ago. But even then, 25 years ago, information was closely guarded. It was very difficult to hear what's going on. And, and I think that's something, I guess, some of us older people, unless we're in the industry, underestimate how much young people are connecting with each other, obviously through the internet, and they seem to be doing things. So maybe they're not tied up with maybe the older idea of the economy.

Nigel Rawlins: so you work in the area of talent. Can you talk to me a bit more about talent in the workforce? I mean, you would have seen a lot over the years.

Marleen Deleu: It's my passion, and I really love to talk about it, so thank you. Talent is is scarce. And talent is crucial for organizations. It's a new gold. So it's really important that organizations take better care of their talents. The talent that's already working in their company, but also their future talents.

They need to be much more appealing to attract the best talents that are scarce in the labor market. If they don't have the talent, they really are in trouble. You already see that happening. I don't know about Australia, but here, some restaurants, can only do one shift in an evening because they lack the people to waiter and to serve or prepare the food.

It's really going to a point that there's just not enough hands to do the work. And it's only the beginning, because if you look at the demographic pyramid, we're not there yet, you know, the worst moment is going to be in 2030, so it's getting worse every year. And there's not much happening on behalf of the government, for instance. I think they don't see the issue enough and they're not supporting enough to really solve this issue.

But it's also not on, on the 'C' level agenda in many organizations. In a month's time, I'm invited for the first time to give a keynote to board members of major companies. But it's the first time that this topic will be on their agenda, Which in my opinion is really amazing!

It should've been there ten years ago, because it's not new. We already knew this was going to happen, and it's a perfect storm. It's demographics, but it's also technology, always new technology, and you cannot train enough people to follow all these evolutions in technology, so you you knew already ten years ago that the gap would be growing and growing, increasing every time again.

So yeah, it's so stupid that they didn't anticipate enough. But okay, here we are now. So what can you do? What you should do is look at all the talent that is available and there is again on the side of organizations, they're still ignoring the fact that not everybody who is working for the organization is on their payroll.

There's much more people working for an organization than those who are on the payroll. Yet they don't have an overview of the people that are not on the payroll that are contingent workers. They have no idea, who are these people? Do we know these people? Do we need these people? What are we paying them?

Do we have a contract with these people? Is there any legal issues. If you start asking all these questions, you see, they really get nervous because they don't have the answers to these questions. So there's a lot more people working for an organization than the people on the payroll, and it's not organized and that's really an issue.

And it's an issue for all these reasons, you should know how much money you're spending. You should know if anybody can sue you, whatever, but it's also an issue because it's talent, it's people. And if, if you don't have a strategy and a vision. That you don't treat these people well and so they can ruin your reputation. They don't want to stay. So, you're not attractive to the best talent in the labor market and that's something that should be solved quite urgently in a lot of organizations.

Nigel Rawlins: I was just thinking about the Gallup studies on labour participation and the fact that an awful lot of people are quiet quitting. They're actually going to work but not doing a lot.

Marleen Deleu: Exactly, yeah. Silent quitting, yeah, people are there, but they're not engaged. And so if you don't know who your entire workforce is, if there's 30, 40 percent of people that are contingent, but HR doesn't manage them, has no idea who these people are, there's no follow up on evaluation, no feedback. If there is no check for culture fit, there's no connection to the mission of the organization, you don't. get the best value out of these people. And, you're wasting talent, good talent, which is a shame. It's a shame for all parties involved.

Nigel Rawlins: And what we should talk about is, if you are managing talent well, what does that mean for an organization? How does it help an organization if they really get on top of this?

Marleen Deleu: Well, I think you just mentioned the Gallup studies. I think it's also Gallup who every year again asks CEOs, what's your biggest asset? And they always answer it's talent. It's people who make the company, it's talent who makes the company, and if you don't have the right people on board, then you have an issue.

But if you only know 60 or 70 percent of your entire workforce really well and you're missing out on 30 to 40 percent of the other part of the workforce, you don't have a hundred percent of your workforce that's working for you. So that's really not good.

Nigel Rawlins: I was chatting to somebody the other day, I can't say the industry that they're in, but they're saying that they respond to customer calls and deal with certain issues. This person can do it, talks to the person on the phone and has something out to that person in three minutes.

And then somebody who's got higher qualifications who's been brought into this unit, disappears for two hours, just walks off, not, not supposed to, but does and gets away with it. And they're able to track what each other's doing. And he says, well, I get my stuff out in three minutes.

And this other person takes 47 minutes. So, I guess it's a productivity issue and we're not talking about people being slaves or anything, but just being organized and doing the right thing for the particular people they're trying to help.

Marleen Deleu: Exactly. And then everybody who's working for an organization should be connected to the mission, fit into the culture, all these human things that are important, let alone from the administrative part, but that's a detail, it's more important to treat everybody the same.

Why distinguish between, hey, you're on the payroll, so, hey, we're really good for you, you have this onboarding program, et cetera, et cetera. And, oh, you're only the contingent worker and, okay, get started because you'll send an invoice and you're very expensive, that's the idea behind it. So don't waste time on you, just get started.

And you see these differences, and I say, no, everybody's, it's human. It's a dehumanization of the workers that are not on the payroll. And that I don't see the benefit of that for an organization.

Nigel Rawlins: When I was chatting to, Valentine Gitaud from Paris recently on the podcast. And she says that her job is to go into organizations and trying to help them understand what it is to work today compared to the industrial age. And I guess that's one of the issues is people are not necessarily seen as talent, they're seen as numbers.

And I would probably assume that in some fairly big organizations, people are just numbers in many ways. So how does an organization make that shift to start celebrating the talent that they've got working for them?

Marleen Deleu: Well, you need support from C-level. It's culture in an organization. Vision comes from the top. That's where it starts. They need to recognize that their workforce is much more than the people on the payroll. It's everybody, it's the contingent workers, the freelancers, but also people working for subcontractors, everybody has to be on board and be engaged to their mission and their culture, et cetera, et cetera. And then they really have to go to HR and to procurement and to tell them, hey, listen, this is our new vision, we want you to treat all workers the same as much as possible within the legal framework, of course.

In Belgium, you need to distinguish from a legal perspective between workers on the payroll and external workers. But within that framework there's no excuse not to do anything. So you can have onboarding, if you have an onboarding process for your employees. We always say, mirror that to an onboarding process for your contingent workers.

So it's not that the law stipulates that should be different. That's an excuse for not to do anything. So it just has to be different. And you can do that with all these HR processes. Why did I say that procurement should be involved? Well, procurement is specialist or specialized in managing vendors and of course you have staffing vendors who supply contingent workers, and so you also need to manage these vendors and that's the domain of procurement.

So HR and procurement are really in this together and they have to manage this part of the workforce together.

Nigel Rawlins: I just suddenly popped into my head. I didn't realize there are temp agencies, they're supplying people all the time. When I was a teacher, if you were sick, you had to get an, what we called an emergency teacher to fill a job. I've suddenly realized what you just said, I hadn't even thought about it, that the contingent workforce can be made up of temp workers coming in to do admin work or something like that, just to fill a spot where somebody's sick or, away on leave or something. Is that the case there.

Marleen Deleu: Yeah, absolutely. It can be a very short assignment, but sometimes it's for projects for three, four years, and anything in between that. Absolutely. Sometimes you don't know how long a period can be. So, it can be anything.

Nigel Rawlins: That's interesting. So, be cause one of the things I've been thinking about is you've got freelancers out there and do they call themselves freelancers?

Marleen Deleu: Yes. Yeah. In Belgium they do, yeah.

Nigel Rawlins: We've got freelancers out there who maybe work for themselves and then you've obviously got temp agencies that have got their temporary people that they can put in even for longer term projects.

So how does an organisation find, say, a specialist freelancer who's not in a temp agency that they need to help them? What goes on there do you think?

Marleen Deleu: Well, in Belgium it's still pretty conservative and what we see is that people work via their network. And people in organizations, they contact their neighbors, their sister in law, whatever is in their network, and they say, hey, I'm looking for someone with this and this skills, do you know anybody?

And that's how it works. There's slowly but certainly a shift towards freelance management systems. So, online platforms where they can find, freelance talent available. And on the other hand, of course, freelance talent looking for projects. It's still rather new to many organizations, but it's growing fast. So it's platforms.

Nigel Rawlins: Well, one of the issues there is If talent is scarce and you've got a project that's critical, and we know that if you want to hire somebody, you've got to advertise for the position, you've then got to find them, you've got to interview them and then that could take a few months and then to get them up to speed, you're looking at six months probably, or even longer to get them into your culture.

Whereas freelance talent, if you can locate, you can put a team together fairly fast. So are you seeing anything like that happening?

Marleen Deleu: Oh, yes, absolutely. A big frustration of HR. They have all these procedures and processes and assignments and that, and you end up with the long period of time before someone is finally ready to start on the assignment. But, yeah, the business cannot always wait that long and they say, okay, are you competent?

Yes. Are you available Monday? Yes. Okay. You get started Monday. And that's it. And they get started. And then often what you see is that they forget about the contract, so a lot of freelancers work without a contract and because freelance workers and their clients, they're yin and yang, so it's also a lot of companies working with freelancers without a contract.

Which is of course illegal, but that's not a problem for these business unit managers. They needed somebody in a very short time notice and then they arranged it. So what's the problem? The project got launched. Who cares about administrative details like that?

And, it's really these kind of issues that really need to be solved, and I think HR has to find ways to do these assessments a lot in a shorter period of time, and of course the business has to remain compliant to the legal framework.

There's no discussion about that. But looking from a distance to an organization, it's this kind of processes and procedures within an organization that really should change quite drastically to be much more agile. And to work with any talent that is available.

Is it a talent looking for a permanent job? Well, there's so many job offers to this talent, these scarce talents, that if you're not fast enough and you're not attractive enough in your offering, then you lose time and time again the best candidates. The same goes for freelance talent. You need to be very swift, respond, really play the ball.

When it comes, go for it, just have your offering and your processes and procedures ready to be very agile and very quick.

Nigel Rawlins: That makes me think if you're working in HR now or you're just moving into HR, well, manager or HR person in the industry, what do they need to know now?

Marleen Deleu: That's a very good question, I've had discussions with universities and high schools here in Belgium, because, on their program to be future HR managers, there's nothing on contingent workers, on flexible work arrangements. They have no idea of the legal framework. They have no idea of how strategically important all these different contract forms can be for an organization.

How to do strategic workforce planning. Not just looking at your firm population, but to take also the contingent workers into account. And, to really work with all these different contract forms. And to arrange for the most ideal constellation of workforce for the organization within two, three years time.

They have no idea. I really think it's a shame for our educational system that it's not on the program of these high schools and universities.

Nigel Rawlins: The interesting thing about that in terms of business is, well, not so much that they need to stay competitive is that they need to stay relevant and productive and to stay in business.

Marleen Deleu: Yeah. Absolutely. Yeah.

Nigel Rawlins: One of the things I do know is that they tend to keep themselves well up to date and they keep learning.

So what do you suggest to anyone, maybe an older person who's getting sick and tired of working in a job full time? What should they be doing, do you think, in terms of their skills, networks and stuff like that to maybe position themselves? To be available for freelance work.

Marleen Deleu: Well, I think freelancing is not something for everybody to do. So, I think people really have to consider it. And if you still feel like, if I don't try to start as a freelancer, I may regret it later. So if that's the case, why not start as a freelancer light? So as an addition to your current job, and you can really taste from life as a freelancer and see if it's something for you.

And, if it's more than a hobby, if you can make a living out of it, if you really enjoy looking for clients, looking for gigs, that's the point where most freelancers find themselves confronted with the negative side of being a freelancer. It's me, myself, and I. It can be very lonely.

And if there's something that you don't like, like looking for new clients or networking, not everybody loves that. So there's nothing wrong with working as an employee but, then don't stick to the your employer if you're not happy there. You can be entrepreneurial as an employee as well.

And take your own career in your hands and make yourself happy and follow your passion and your interests and you can do that also as an employee. That's always something I tell people. My message with Nexconomy is not that everybody should start as a freelancer.

I've been working as an employee for years, and I really wanted to start as a freelancer, and I made every possible mistake. I wasn't prepared. I didn't have a business plan, my proposition was not clear, what was I selling? It was, in my head it was clear, but when it came out of my mouth, it was vague, it was not clear, because I wasn't prepared, of course.

I had no idea of prices, I had no idea if you have this certain amount of income, how do I optimize this and how much net income will this bring to me? I make every possible mistake. So, I always tell that very openly to people to prevent them from making the same mistake.

Starting as a freelancer is starting a business, and that's really different from just selling by the hour and say my hourly rate is this or this amount in euros or dollars or whatever. No, it's starting a business and you really need to prepare for starting a business.

Nigel Rawlins: Oh, I totally agree. I did the same thing when I quit teaching. I had no idea what I was doing. And, uh, I probably undercharged for many, many years. And I probably still do. Europe's got a very big population, so, I'm assuming if you're living in a city, there's more and more people around you that you can talk to and network with or get some ideas on pricing and share knowledge. Whereas I guess in Australia, we're spread out, pretty well everywhere, because we're such a big country and such a small population.

If we were in Europe, we'd probably have 50 times the population. And I guess that's the issue, but whereas in Europe, you've got a good sized population, you're close to other countries. So a lot of these ideas can spread much faster. What would you suggest to there?

Marleen Deleu: What would I suggest to freelancers?

Nigel Rawlins: Yeah, to freelancers, are they better off being in a city if they're going to freelance, unless they've got a talent, they can't necessarily live in the middle of nowhere like sort of I do.

Marleen Deleu: I think the pandemic made people here realize that distance is something that's very relative and that technology makes it possible, to work from any place, and for anybody in the world, and so what you see during the pandemic, a lot of people from Belgium, the Netherlands, and other cold and wet countries, they flew to, their beach house in Spain, or their parents house in Greece, or whatever, a nice sunny country.

And they worked from there. So that opened the world for freelancers and I don't think it makes much difference anymore if you're a freelance in the heart of Brussels or you're a freelancer in, uh, in Australia in a small town with 2000 inhabitants. You can work from home and work for any company all over the world.

NASA, the airspace company, do crowdsourcing for technology, technological innovations, and they work with people from literally all over the world. So that's great, if you can sit in Australia and say, hey, I'm working for NASA, you don't have to go to Florida anymore to, to do that.

So this technology opens the world for you, literally, so if that's something you like, that's great. You have the world at your feet.

Nigel Rawlins: Okay, Marleen, what do you think about older women who are talented in their work and maybe a senior manager or something like that. They might actually, think about retiring because if they're at that age, in Australia, they may have enough savings that at 60 or even 55, if they want to go out and continue working.

Have you got some thoughts on that?

Marleen Deleu: Yes, I do. And I really would say, just go for it and follow your heart. If you love to be entrepreneurial, then now is the time. You don't risk that much, because there is this financial buffer. So there's this financial buffer that you can afford to take a risk there.

But also, you know yourself a lot better than when you were 20 25. If I look at myself, my husband always kept me from starting my own business during my career as an employee, because he had already a business, and he said we don't want to risk both being independent with our children.

They have to go to university with all these costs, and we have a house, et cetera, et cetera. So one of us, working as an employee is financially less risky. But the minute our youngest son finished or graduated from university, he said, you can do whatever you like now. And I quit. it was really for me the signal, okay, I really want to try it, and if it doesn't work, okay, I'll give it two, three years time, and I'll see where I end.

And so now, we're ten years later, and I'm still enjoying myself. And people really told me, literally, Marlene, you're crazy. You're crazy. Why are you doing this? Why don't you learn, why don't you learn to play golf and go play golf every day? The people really said that to me and I was like, golf, I hate that.

It's nothing for me. I don't like, but yeah, It's following my passion, but also I really wanted to prove, that I can do it. And, I really had this drive in me, yeah, I can do this. So, just do it and jump and there's not that much to lose, and even if you fail, if you're not successful, you learn so much, you learn so much. I think it's always a positive experience that enriches you as a person.

Nigel Rawlins: I totally agree. I think I failed a lot and made lots of mistakes, but you soon learn if you've got that resilience. And I guess that's one of the issues that I've come across is, senior women, they may have been running very important departments and really on the ball, sometimes lack the confidence just to go out for themselves.

Have you come across that?

Marleen Deleu: Yes, but I've had some inspiring women around me, and like you said, one of them was CEO of a major company leading, I think 300, 400 people, so very, very successful. And then she retired, and she started a new business. And people also say, hey, you're crazy.

But she said, no, I'm just too young to do nothing. And I really have this energy in me, this drive. And I really want to become an entrepreneur again. And, she's doing great. It's really amazing what she's doing all the time. And she can balance a lot better than I think when, when she was younger.

She takes time off, she has a daughter living in Costa Rica, so she goes to Costa Rica for some time, but she, she can run her business and due to technology as well, it's not because you're in Costa Rica that you're not in contact in touch with your business here. She really has this balance, so, for me, she's an example, and I really, feel inspired by some of these women around me who lead the way for me.

Nigel Rawlins: So how old is too old, do you think?

Marleen Deleu: No, there is not, no such thing as too old. No, it's, I think it's about passion and energy and, yeah, having a good backup. Because I felt supported by my husband and my family. There's this financial situation that gave me the certainty that okay, I can try this. There's no harm done if I If it doesn't work in two years time.

So yeah, it has to be okay in that way, but make a plan make a plan, I didn't make a plan that was my mistake

Nigel Rawlins: Marleen how would you like people to contact you?

Marleen Deleu: Oh, yes, thank you. I'm on LinkedIn. I think that's the easiest way to get in touch. Just reach out through LinkedIn, and take a look at nextconomy. be. But, unfortunately for you, it's in Dutch and in French on our website. So most information, so that's maybe a bit difficult. But if you want to get in touch with me in person just reach out via LinkedIn.

That's the easiest way.

Nigel Rawlins: That's fantastic. Well, Marleen, thank you very much for being a guest on the Wisepreneurs podcast.

An honor. Thank you, Nigel. Thank you so much.