Is the Traditional Staffing Model Dead?

Dr John Wentzel, CEO of Adcorp Holdings, joined Colin Iles for the first event in Deel's Future of Work series to argue that the traditional, Henry Ford-era staffing model, permanent, hierarchical, fixed hours, fixed location, is dead for white-collar and knowledge work, even if it survives largely intact in manufacturing and other blue-collar sectors. Trained as a nuclear physicist before a career spanning FMCG, banking, logistics and retail, Wentzel joined Adcorp mid-pandemic because he saw it as a rare chance to help reshape an entire industry, not just run a company.

The Henry Ford model: why it's dead for some workers, not others

Wentzel's core thesis is that the model most people recognize, hierarchical, tied to a fixed location, built around fixed start and finish times, is a product of early 20th-century manufacturing, and it has largely passed for white-collar and knowledge-based industries. He qualifies this carefully: manufacturing and other blue-collar sectors still depend on a fixed location and fixed hours because of the nature of the work itself, so the "death" of the traditional model is uneven across sectors. He also frames it as a longer arc than the pandemic: the shift has been underway since before COVID, as generation Y and generation Z entered the workforce with different expectations of what a job looks like.

Purpose and the 2007-2009 tipping point

Wentzel traces the rise of "purpose" as a business priority to the 2007-2009 financial crisis, describing it as a backlash against treating profit maximization as the sole measure of a company's value. He cites investor questions at Adcorp's own results presentation days earlier, ExxonMobil losing significant investor votes on ESG issues in the preceding weeks, and Total's rebrand to TotalEnergies, as evidence that purpose is now a financial expectation, not a marketing exercise. He references an academic study, from MIT or Harvard Business School, finding that companies with an authentic, lived purpose significantly outperformed peers whose purpose wasn't backed by action. His view: within ten years, companies without a genuine purpose will be punished by investors.

The workforce now spans permanent, gig, crowdsourced and non-human workers

Wentzel describes today's workforce as a spectrum that didn't exist in the old model: permanent workers, contingent workers, contractors, gig workers, crowdsourcing or "human cloud," and non-human workers such as AI and robots. He cites SIA (Staffing Industry Analysts) research showing a consistent decade-long trend of employers expecting the permanent share of their workforce to shrink, concentrated in white-collar roles rather than blue-collar ones. He argues the deeper problem isn't the changing mix of workers, it's that managerial training hasn't kept pace: managers are still largely equipped only for command-and-control, "presenteeism" style leadership, where being able to see an employee is treated as a proxy for managing them.

COVID proved remote work doesn't kill productivity, but it exposed a mental health cost

Wentzel says productivity spiked, not dropped, when companies were forced into full work-from-home almost overnight, briefly convincing some organizations that office space was optional. But roughly six months into the pandemic, he says the costs of extended remote work surfaced: mental health issues linked to lost social connection, and weaker team cohesion. He draws an analogy to a South African retailer debating Sunday trading hours: the conclusion, that shopping is a social function and not just a utility, applies equally to the office, which he argues serves a social purpose beyond being a place to do tasks. His prediction is a hybrid model, employees in two or three days a week, rather than either full-time office or full-time remote.

Why salaries could face pressure as location stops mattering

Responding to a question about geographic salary disparities, Wentzel argues that once companies are willing to hire remote workers from anywhere, ordinary supply and demand economics take over. A worker in a lower-cost location can bid the same job at a lower price than a worker in a higher-cost location, putting downward pressure on salaries in expensive markets as the pool of competing labor is no longer bounded by geography. He flags the UK's zero-hours contracts as an example of how gig and contingent work can be exploited if companies don't remunerate and treat non-permanent workers fairly.

Is the traditional staffing model actually dead?

Not universally. Wentzel's answer is that it is functionally dead for white-collar and knowledge-based industries, which have shifted toward permanent, contingent, contractor, gig and non-human labor mixes, but it remains largely intact in manufacturing and other blue-collar sectors where work still depends on a fixed location and fixed hours.

Will the gig economy explode because of remote work?

Wentzel expects it to grow rather than explode. He points to SIA's multi-year survey data showing employers consistently expect their permanent workforce share to shrink while the contractor, contingent and gig components grow, but stresses this is a gradual shift in mix, not a wholesale displacement of permanent employees.

Does remote work hurt company culture?

Not inherently, according to Wentzel. He argues culture is set by leadership, not location, so organizations with progressive, caring leaders who live their purpose can sustain culture in a hybrid or remote model. The real risk is to leadership quality: managers who rely on presenteeism and clock-watching rather than genuine leadership will struggle, and that failure gets blamed on remote work when the actual cause is weak leadership.