At present，China is still facing great employment pressure with prominent structural contradictions. Especially，COVID-19 has increased the uncertainty of enterprises’ development environment. In addition，technological advances may produce greater crowding-out effect than compensation effect in some periods of firms’ upgrading. On this background，the improvement of flexible employment market can be beneficial to reduce the costs of small and medium-sized private enterprises，meanwhile providing a new path to stabilize national macro-level employment，promote economic recovery and labor supply-side reform. According to the questionnaires from more than 100 Shanghai private enterprises involved in online new economy during COVID-19，we find that these enterprises have ambivalence to flexible employment. On one hand，flexible employment can reduce production costs. On the other hand，they are worried about failing to achieve the desired results and taking risks of potential employment system. The paper combs the policies and institutional environment of flexible employment，furtherly analyze the institutional obstacles and core demands of enterprises for flexible employment from the actual investigation. By summarizing and comparing the international reform contents and policy effects，we finally make suggestions from the policy support，third-party professional service construction and the active fiscal policies.