What Is Contingent Workforce Management?
Contingent workforce management is the process of finding and engaging non-permanent workers in a company in an efficient way. It includes everything from hiring, assigning tasks, performance management to making payments to them.
While a lot of tasks are similar, you cannot manage the contingent workforce like how you would manage your employees or use the existing employee management systems. To engage contingent workers, have a dedicated contingent workforce management in place, to get the best without complicating the processes.
Need for Managing Contingent Workforce
Managing a global contingent workforce is complex. However it’s worth the effort. Contingent workers provide several benefits like:
- Enabling you to quickly scale up resources
- Access niche skills to deliver projects
- Meet seasonal demands
To get the full benefits of this workforce, you need an effective contingent workforce management system. Not only should you be able to get the best work out of them, but you should also be able to provide a good work experience.
Unlike your full-time employees, your contingent workforce can choose to move on from your engagement as and when they find better opportunities. So, you should be able to manage these talents well enough that they would want to continue working with you.
Many companies manage their contingent workforce on a department-to-department basis and make the mistake of having one employee as a point of contact with their contingent workers. This results in the rest of the company not being aware of the talents they have access to and might result in wasteful spending on hiring more workers.
Managing a contingent workforce in a transparent way will help your business get the best out of the contingent workforce that they already have in place.
Effective Contingent Workforce Management Options
Managing the contingent workforce involves many challenges and without an effective management solution, it can be quite a task. With businesses moving towards relying on a contingent workforce, a proper contingent talent management system is not a bonus but a necessity.
One option is to build a system in-house. However, this will require some expertise in the areas of supplier management processes and employment methods. The HR will also need to use the data of the company’s existing contingent workforce. While this is possible, it might not be the most effective option especially if your HR team doesn’t have people with this expertise or if they do not have the bandwidth.
Thankfully, there are more effective alternatives. The worldwide contingent workforce trend has resulted in global contingent workforce management solutions as well. The following are some of the common options used by many companies.
Using Vendor Management System:
Vendor Management Systems are software that can help you manage your contingent workforce. These are typically created based on the needs of the businesses and are hosted on the cloud. There are many options in the market and you can choose the ones that suit your needs. While these might prove to be a great solution when your contingent talent pool is less in number and the tasks are straightforward, it can be taxing to manage a more complex workforce through them.
Getting a Managed Service Provider:
Want both the hiring and the vendor management system to be taken care of by somebody else? No problem! Managed Service Providers can do that for you. They help you find the best talents and can manage all aspects of your contingent workforce for you using various tools.
Try Business Process Outsourcing (BPO):
Instead of hiring talents under the name of your company, you can outsource the task/project to a third-party service provider altogether. You can define the scope of work, timeline, and price, and they will finish the project for you. For example, many businesses choose to engage a marketing agency instead of hiring individual talents for it. This way, the talents will be managed by the other company and it reduces the responsibility and number of people that you have to manage for your business.
Benefits of Effective Contingent Workforce Management
A contingent workforce offers many benefits to a company. When this workforce is managed effectively, the benefits can be significantly higher.
Get the best talents
With a streamlined hiring process, you can ensure you only engage the best of talents. Rogue hiring is a big problem faced by many companies when they leave the hiring to the teams and don’t supervise.
Scale quickly
Hiring and engaging new contingent workers doesn’t involve the same complex processes as hiring new employees and onboarding them to your system. This option allows a company to scale quickly and with relatively less hassle.
Save costs
The contingent workforce in general saves a lot for the company as they are not given the benefits that are mandatory for the employees. You can leverage the competitive gig economy to get the best talents for a reasonable cost. With a good system in place, you can retain these workers and avoid wasteful spending in talent hunting.
High-quality work
A contingent workforce tends to produce higher quality work when managed well.
Increased efficiency
With a proper contingent talent management system in place, the efficiency is automatically increased.
Visibility of the workforce
Have a clear understanding of the talents available and make the best use of them to achieve internal goals.
Using the contingent workforce management best practices like creating a good experience for the contingent workers, including them in the performance management processes, etc, will help you maximize the benefits from the workforce.
Key Challenges in Managing Contingent Workforce
While the contingent workforce offers great benefits, they pose many challenges as well. The fluidity of this workforce lets a company scale up and down at will, on the other hand, it is also volatile and less reliable. While you might have to give fair control of the work over to contingent workers, it is essential to manage the quality of the work produced by them as the end responsibility falls on the company.
The range of workers employed on a contingent basis can vary greatly across different sectors. These workers can be working from multiple locations, hold varying degrees of responsibility, and engage differently with the company. This makes managing them more complex compared to full-time employees who work in the office. Another point of
concern is that one cannot have a complete oversight of work done by the contingent workers.
Apart from managing the workers, one has to make sure that all laws are complied with while engaging them. The laws on engaging contingent workers vary across different countries and have to be kept in mind while engaging them.
Manage your Contingent Workforce with Multiplier
Particularly, when hiring independent contractors across international borders you would need to heed local compliance and labor laws. You need to know what kind of benefits they must be endowed with if the local government entitles them to benefits.
Here is where an EOR like Multiplier can help. Our SaaS-based EOR solution is a modern-day solution to effectively manage your overseas contractors. By using Multiplier you can :
- Set up a global team with 100% compliance
- Employ an unlimited number of contractors and contingent workers
- Increase employee engagement and satisfaction by offering emphatic benefits
Book a demo today to learn more about Multiplier.
