Metasys Blog

With Coronavirus confining your workforce to their homes, management by walking around is no longer an option. But while your team may be working away from the office, your leadership and people skills may be more important than ever before as you guide your organization through these trying times. If you are unused to managing a remote workforce, you may want to alter your style to accommodate your most important asset.

In the wake of the Coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic, there’s a good chance you have been assigned to work from home. If you’re not used to performing your job remotely, it can seem a daunting proposition. Blocking distractions, staying motivated, maintaining lines of communication, even knowing when to knock off for the day are all real challenges for work-from-home neophytes. Fortunately, a significant portion of the employment universe has blazed a trail through the remote-work wilderness. Freelancers, contractors, consultants, and other contingent workers know how to deal with the hurdles associated with non-traditional work. You can learn from their processes, tricks, and hacks that help them take advantage of all the benefits working from home offers.

The convergence of interactive talent engagement tools with a shift in worker mindset has created opportunities for companies to acquire critical project skills more easily and expeditiously. As the preference for on-demand talent spreads across industries, companies must adjust to the new workforce paradigm or be trampled on the battlefield for workers possessing the specialized skills needed to survive the competitive business climate.

Virtual offices, mobile computing, and instantaneous communication mean access to human talent is no longer limited by geographical proximity. The ever-flattening business environment gives companies access to diverse talent pools that disrupt workforce management models and transform the way tasks get assigned, performed, managed, and implemented.

The nature of work is changing, and companies that don’t adapt the way they find and utilize talent will be left in the dust. That’s a scary proposition for many firms that either prefer the traditional, full-time workers with 30-year careers model or have made little progress toward a plan to manage non-traditional workers. As robots, machine learning, and other types of automation eliminate the need for human intervention in many routine and low-skill tasks, identifying and capturing specialized skills have created the new frontier of competition within every industry.

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.

If you’re like most business decision makers, you have already taken advantage of the flexibility, skill, diversity, and other benefits a contingent workforce brings to your organization. But to truly accrue all the advantages agile talent can offer, it may be advantageous to partner with professional outside vendors to hire, train, onboard, and manage your part-time, freelance, and statement-of-work workers. Working with managed service providers (MSP), vendor management system (VMS), third-party payroll service firm can save companies time, effort, and money by providing the most qualified candidates, expediting the onboarding process, and overcoming logistical challenges.