All of these employees are also known as your contingent workforce, and your ability to choose and manage them makes all the difference for the productivity of your business. Even more so, it allows you to find talented workers for project-specific demands, fill talent gaps, and not to mention reduce the payroll costs associated with full-time hiring. You can also hire globally, since there isn’t always a need to hire on-site staff.
If done properly, a contingent workforce strategy can help you flourish. If not, you risk incurring even greater costs, poor candidate fit, and diminishing your reputation across the globe. To help you protect your business and your investments, here are a few ideas on how you can manage your contingent workforce strategy successfully.
Regularly analyze your workforce situation
Tracking your team’s performance has a multitude of benefits for your entire organization and your workers. You’ll be able to spot productivity gaps, potential burnout when your employees are overworked, or slow seasons when you’re spending too much on staffing. This will help you create a contract workforce strategy that makes sense.
- Spot the needed talent, as well as the times and projects when you need particular professionals to complete your work properly.
- Recruiting the right people at the right time means cutting labor costs and reducing hiring issues.
- You’ll recognize patterns in when and why some people leave – which in turn helps you prevent high turnover for future projects and allows you to hire people who fit in with your culture and meet your professional expectations.
- You’ll learn which hiring strategies are the most effective, and which ones are a waste of your time and budget.
Communication software for easier collaboration
Contract workers might not necessarily stick with your business for the long haul, nor will they necessarily come back for more work in the years to come. Despite all that, you should make sure the time they do spend with your business is well-organized and that they can easily collaborate with your full-time staff.
To help them integrate more easily into your organization, use a range of tech tools that simplify remote collaboration, temporary projects, and overall team communication. No matter where they are, your contingent workers will be able to seamlessly work with your in-house staff for as long as they’re needed.
Onboarding and management under a single strategy
A global workforce calls for global knowledge. From legal intricacies, hiring regulations, all the way to taxes and compliance, your business needs to take care of it all, preferably under one roof. When you’re looking to hire internationally, using a global employer of record services provided by professionals can help you reduce all kinds of risks and improve your workforce management.
Unified global solutions allow you to hire internationally, remotely, on-site, whichever way you see fit, all the while taking excellent care of all your employees. From the moment you determine you need contingent workers, you can rely on your partner to handle the onboarding, payroll, and benefits, all the way to offboarding when the work is done, whether on a seasonal or project basis.
Get your employees to share their needs
Your analytics reveal plenty of data that you can rely on when you’re making all your hiring decisions. However, sometimes your workers know even more, as they are the ones dealing with the day-to-day processes in your organization. Regular feedback can help you get a better understanding of when it’s time to rely on additional, temporary workers.
- Employee referrals are extremely helpful for hiring people that will enjoy your culture and your processes.
- Feedback from your contingent and full-time workers will help you find out which tools work and which ones don’t, so that you cut your spending and invest only in the kind of tech that serves your workers.
- Your employees will likely be the first to notice an increase in workload, and they can help you start hiring contract workers earlier, so as to avoid overloading your staff. This will help maintain the right balance in your business and it will increase engagement.
Let your culture adapt to embrace contract workers
Diversification in hiring often comes as a result of a corporate culture that is open and transparent by nature. That, however, is not always the case. Before you start hiring, make sure that your contingent workers will fit into your culture based on your values, expectations, and overall brand purpose.
Perhaps you’ll need to work on developing the kind of culture that is more welcoming and diverse, which is what happened for so many businesses in the wake of the pandemic – they had to adapt to survive. This is a good moment for all companies to take advantage of contract-based collaboration, but also to move towards a cultural shift that embraces such collaboration as natural and beneficial.
There is no one-size-fits-all for managing contingent workers, freelancers, and contract staff. You need to keep an open mind, and strategically plan for every hire in order to elevate retention, even among your temporary workers. Use these tips, and you’ll be able to build a strong hiring and management strategy that will protect your financial stability as well as your culture.
BY TECHIE MAMMA