6 Ways to Maximize Your Company’s Success Through Contingent Labor Programs

The present-day business arena is incredibly fast-paced, mobile, and relentless. With things as they are, achieving an optimal level of efficiency and staying competitive requires quick reactions and an incredible level of flexibility that are not always attainable through traditional business and labor programs or models.

So, it shouldn’t really come off as a surprise that a contingency workforce, or in other words teams of people hired temporarily or on a per-project basis to deal with specific problems, experienced massive growth in popularity.

However, hiring contingent teams is far from a simple quick-patch solution that immediately solves all business problems. Using this model successfully requires a lot of planning and very careful execution. Let us take a look then at a couple of ways to successfully use this employment option and maximize the success of your company.

Define performance goals and metrics

Contingent teams, by their very nature, work outside your native management infrastructure. This high level of autonomy can often lead to miscommunication and underwhelming performance. That is why contingent teams need to be presented with a very clear set of goals and objectives they will need to work toward to complete the project.

Also, you should provide the contingent workers with a similar set of KPIs and expected scores they are going to use to measure progress and sync up with the rest of the staff. As long as these two factors are in place, new workers can retain as much autonomy as possible.

Sort out the legal requirements

This is especially important if you are going to use a foreign workforce, which is, due to affordable costs and ever-developing collaboration platforms, becoming an increasingly likely option. Keeping that in mind, though, we have to remember that different countries, and in some cases, even federal states, have drastically different labor requirements.

Ensuring legal compliance with all these regulations, in turn, almost always entails finding a local legal entity. Be sure then to carefully research all things and if possible use employer of record services since they present a far more elegant and simpler solution.

Lay out appropriate business infrastructure

Even though they, for the most part, work autonomously, they need to be integrated into your business infrastructure or they won’t be able to successfully collaborate with the rest of the team. For that to be possible, your business infrastructure needs to demonstrate a great deal of flexibility.

That is most easily accomplished by switching from centralized in-house infrastructure to a much looser outsourced model, like for instance, using professional payroll services. The second option is greater reliance on cloud-based business platforms that are inherently scalable, flexible, and works on a pay-as-you-go model.

Make temporary labor a part of the team

This will, for a variety of reasons, prove to be a very difficult job. Be that as it may, keeping the new workers completely outside the loop will compromise their ability to work with other employees and affect contingent teams’ efficiency.

You can start cracking this issue by simply including the contingent workers in all corporate activities and programs that are otherwise reserved for your in-house staff. This includes training sessions, team-building events, and so on. Furthermore, you should set up a clear communication infrastructure that will encourage spontaneous feedback and chatter.

Keep up the pace with the latest business trends

Contingent teams and hybrid workplaces are often cited as a force that will reshape the future of work. If you want to use these resources to the fullest extent, you will need to keep up with all the relevant trends that are reshaping the modern labor market.

This covers a lot of important mentions but you can start your efforts by laying out less strict job roles built around soft skills, higher HR focus on mental well-being and employee’s work-life balance, flexible schedules, options for telecommuting, and other popular factors. Such adjustments will make the integration of future workers much easier.

Streamline and automate the onboarding process

Last but not least, we would like to remind you that since contingent teams are hired on a very short, temporary basis every new project will probably bring new batches of people under your roof. And each time new team members are drafted you will need to go through the very same and exhausting onboarding stage.

Do your best then to make this process as streamlined and, if possible, automated as possible. Giving the contingent teams the ability to explore the various facets of your business at their own pace and as the project challenges currently dictate will take a great burden off your shoulders.

Final comments

We hope these couple of suggestions gave you a general idea about the strategies you can leverage to use the available contingent labor programs in a more efficient and productive manner. The future of the workforce lies in contingent teams.

However, hiring these workers and expecting that they will be able to sort out all the issues within your company on their own is not really feasible. Use the tips we gave you and you will bridge the gaps that are preventing your company from working at an optimal level.

By Brigitte Evans