Metasys Blog

Organizations’ first experiences with the contingent workforce often come incrementally. They hire some seasonal sales reps or inventory help. A few months later they work with a graphics consultant on an event logo. Then the next year maybe they contract with a freelance writer for a drip marketing campaign. Before they know it, what started as a few isolated transactions undertaken to capitalize on a special opportunity or overcome an unfamiliar challenge evolves into a major component of the firms’ go-to-market approach.

No matter where we are in the economic cycle, the competition for the best talent rages on. Much like the war for customers, companies must leverage their brand positioning to attract, recruit, onboard, and retain people with the skills they need in order to remain successful. Companies have long understood this concept, of course, creating a corporate persona that projects stability, industry leadership, and other characteristics that employees value. But today’s productive teams include more than just full-time employees. To obtain the mix of abilities required to meet customer needs and adroitly implement projects, companies seek to tap into all the labor resources available to them. Statement-of-work workflow consultants, freelance writers, independently contracted accountants, seasonal sales representatives, and other contingent workers increasingly are adding their talents to work teams.

The face of the world’s workforce is changing. As Baby Boomers retire, many seek to put their extensive knowledge and skills to work as freelancers or independent contractors (ICs). At the same time, Millennials and Post-Millennials are seeking different rewards than those associated with full-time careers. There is no question that in order to thrive, companies must embrace this new reality by exploiting the talent available and the cost benefits these contingent workers offer. There is no way organizations can flourish for long without using a significant number of 1099 workers to augment their full-time staff.

With crucial skills available through a variety of platforms, sources, and structures, companies intent upon building a strategic workforce must consider optimizing their use of full-time employees as well as consultants, contractors, freelancers, and other contingent workers. As creating a best-in-class workforce management plan can establish sustainable competitive advantage, finding, hiring, training, paying, and managing contingent workers is rapidly becoming mission critical for many firms. Adequately accounting for the risks, costs, and quality issues involved in using external workers will be one of the most important management concerns as the use of non-traditional workers inexorably rolls on.

Attracting and empaneling people of diverse experiences in positions of authority and proficiency galvanizes the workplace and promotes free exchange of ideas. Collaboration among teammates possessing complementary skillsets and distinct backgrounds expands companies’ ability to respond to and profit from supply, demand, marketing, partnership, and value chain opportunities when they arise. More importantly, a workforce that reflects the public’s varied viewpoints, historical foundations, values, and talents is prepared to answer any social or cultural challenge that may arise within the company or the community in general. As the University of Florida notes, inclusive workforces that feature people of many races, genders, ethnicities, and philosophies “adds cultural insight and intellectual richness to the institution, enhancing its vitality, effectiveness and reputation.”

U.S. companies continue to focus strategic in-house resources on value-adding and competitive advantage activities and outsource more and more services such as supply chain and payroll. In fact, experts estimate American companies spend nearly $2 billion on outsourced services. With competition as fierce as ever, firms must institute tight controls to ensure they get their money’s worth from managed service providers (MSPs) and other vendors.

Seeking to control procurement costs and improve vendor performance, employers often look to statement of work (SOW) labor suppliers to help staff specific projects. SOW is becoming more attractive because it allows companies to accurately forecast costs associated with particular outcomes rather than estimating the time and materials required and factoring in everything that could influence scheduling, productivity, inputs, etc. As a comprehensive, integrated solution for a variety of industries and tasks, SOW demands management expertise that companies often choose to outsource to external workforce providers.

The successful companies of tomorrow will be those that can adapt to the shifting work environment paradigm. Today’s workers increasingly are rejecting the notion that the American Dream includes moving up the company ranks throughout a 35-year career. Instead, more and more workers have decided that their most rewarding career is more about flexibility, new challenges, and contributing to tangible work outcomes, and less about job titles and full-time status. As a result, workers are becoming more specialized, independent, mobile, collaborative, and digitally connected.

The good news is that your organization has begun progressing toward a coordinated, integrated approach to managing its external workforce. Your firm has embraced the workforce flexibility, access to outside skillsets, and enhanced productivity the agile workforce offers. The bad news is that everyone else in your industry has discovered these benefits as well, and competition for top outside talent is fast-paced, fierce, and constantly changing.

Your company no doubt has used non-traditional workers to increase your ability to take advantage of marketing opportunities, control labor costs, and exploit rare and specialized skills that are unavailable among full-time employees. Companies for the most part engage contingent workers on an ad-hoc or piecemeal basis. They discover the need for supply chain experts when it comes time to count inventory. Or they require a data enrichment expert in response to a directive to automate marketing and media buys. This transactional approach remains widespread even as forward-looking firms’ appreciation of strategic management of the agile workforce becomes universal. Deloitte found that 92 percent of the companies it surveyed had yet to implement codified processes to procure and manage alternative workers. Indeed, most organizations make use of freelancers, part-time employees, and other contingent workers merely as fill-ins. As a result, they do not realize the full potential – either strategic or economic – that a progressively managed agile workforce strategy can produce.