Contingent workforce management: everything you need to know

A business’s workforce today looks vastly different to what it looked like years ago. Today, in many businesses across industries, you can expect to find what is often referred to as a contingent workforce, made up of non-permanent staff. This workforce plays an important role in assisting businesses with meeting labour and skills shortages. Below we deep dive into what contingent workforce management is, the challenges experienced, as well as ways to assist in efficiently managing these employees.

What Is contingent workforce management?

Over the past few years, there has been a stark increase in the growth and size of the contingent workforce across industries. For us to understand the impact this has had on business and the challenges it presents we need to understand what contingent workforce management is and what are contingent workers.

In simple terms contingent workforce management refers to the hiring and management of non-permanent employees. These employees work for an organisation without being hired as an employee. These workers usually provide their services under a contract, temporarily or as needed by the organisation.

Contingent workers are often hired when an organisation needs to complete a specific project or job where the workload is increased, and the current employees cannot meet the labour and job specification needs.

Contingent workforce management, therefore, is the process of hiring contingent workers to ensure that you have the right number of employees for the jobs and projects that you need to complete. It also refers to the way in which you manage contingent employment so that they know what their roles and responsibilities are.

How a contingent workforce can benefit your business?

There are various reasons why more and more organisations are relying on contingent workers. This is largely due to the various benefits that a business will experience when utilising contingent workers, including:

• Allowing an organisation to take on more project work while keeping labour costs down.
• Easily adapting to market conditions and their demand.
• Supplementing talent capabilities and accessing specialised skills.
• Increasing the flexibility and responsiveness of the workforce.
• Hiring process is faster, simpler, and often done on short notice.

Challenges related to contingent workforce management

One of the biggest challenges related to contingency employment is the effective management of this workforce. Many organisations do not have the skills or technological solutions to effectively do this which has a significant impact on operational efficiency, customer experience, and ultimately profitability.

One of the contributing factors to this is the lack of integrated workforce management solutions. Without an effective workforce management solution, your contingent workers may not have the information needed to effectively do their job or understand their roles and responsibilities.

From an operations point of view, keeping in track of and managing a number of contingent workers can be incredibly tough especially if your technological solution is inadequate. This is because managing the sheer number of employees’ schedules, both permanent and contingent, not only takes time but when done incorrectly, can negatively impact the business as a whole.

Without an adequate workforce management solution, you will not have the insight needed for contingent staffing, identifying a need for more workers, making essential business decisions, scheduling your workforce efficiently and ensuring that you have the right number of staff in place for the projects and jobs required.

How will a workforce management software like EasyRoster help you manage your contingent workforce?

As mentioned above having an integrated workforce management solution is essential in managing your contingent workforce. EasyRoster is an innovative fit for purpose workforce management software that aims to assist you in maximising labour efficiency, saving on labour costs, and enhancing operational effectiveness through easy scheduling and roster capabilities. This is achieved through the following features:

• Contract management – details regarding each site or location are captured and maintained in EasyRoster allowing you to keep track of labour needs and requirements.
• Personnel management – details regarding each person, permanent and contingent, to be managed are captured and maintained in EasyRoster. This includes information related to their skills levels, ranks, capabilities and more.
• Staff scheduling per location – scheduling (rostering) of personnel shifts are done per location and may be done either manually or automatically – making scheduling contingent workers that much easier.
• Time and attendance per location – capturing actual attendance details is done per location and may be done manually or automatically. This ensures that you can measure workforce productivity.
• Reporting and analytics – these reports enable an operations manager to keep day-to-day control of operations to ensure that costs are kept to a minimum, and personnel requirements are precisely met
• Flexible business rules – EasyRoster is highly flexible, allowing for the creation of customised business rules according to your unique requirements. This is especially important when it comes to contingent workers and needing to change and adapt to the organisation’s changing needs.

Conclusion

The benefits of having a contingent workforce mentioned above have resulted in many businesses turning to adapt their workforce to include more contingent workers. This trend is set to continue to grow over the next few years. With this growth comes many challenges relating to managing this changing workforce, which is where workforce management software come into play. EasyRoster is one solution that ticks all the boxes when it comes to managing your contingent workforce. For more on how this innovative software can be utilised by your organisation click here.