Finding the Appropriate Tech Solutions for Managing your Contingent Workforce

We can safely say that the last couple of years marked the beginning of the golden age of the contingent workforce model. With all the challenges coming in the form of a global pandemic, globalization of the business arena, ongoing labour scarcity, and similar factors, the idea of specialized, outsourced teams hired short-term to deal with specific tasks or projects experienced massive growth in prominence.

Recent surveys say that at the moment, the number of contingent workers in the USA sits at a staggering 52 million which makes 32% of the entire US labor pool.

So, the companies that want to remain fully operational will need to learn to use this new labour model and adapt their management infrastructure to the associated challenges. Let us take a look at some of the tech tools and solutions that should help them along the way.

Bringing HR and procurement on the same page

Compartmentalization gives way to greater autonomy and flexibility. However, keeping the continent workers too much outside the loop will put too much pressure on the assigned management teams. The HR and marketing departments working under the same roof can relieve the pressure. 

Of course, HR departments will inevitably focus on engagement and procurement on costs and risks. Giving these two groups the same set of goals and shared tech infrastructure will help them reach a better understanding and work more efficiently. Filling in the skill gaps will become much simpler as a result.

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Streamlining background checks and onboarding

These two things present some of the biggest challenges associated with managing continent teams. After all, maintaining an optimal level of operational efficiency will become very hard if you need to work from scratch with each new team as they come along. 

Automated onboarding and background-checking processes can go a long way in making this process far simpler. If these systems are designed in an intuitive, sandboxed, and exploratory manner, they will allow new contingent workers to explore the corporate facets they need to deal with at the moment, at the pace suited to their timetable.

Introducing a greater level of automation

If you are looking for a way to use the latest fruits of the tech landscape to improve your contingent workers' management, automation is one of the areas where you will probably be able to reap the greatest benefits. 

Namely, organizing a workforce of any kind consists of a lot of repeatable and data-based tasks. That means, all these chores lend themselves to automation via some professional contingent workforce management platform. Doing that will not only make workforce management easier but also allow strategic planning and richer insights.

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Improving communication with contingent workers

The key to good cooperation lies in good communication. Therefore, if you want to make sure your contingent teams integrate well and are able to cooperate with other teams, you need to look for the latest gen communication and collaboration platforms to meet the end. 

Fortunately, the current market is stacked with tools like Slack and Basecamp. They streamline the communication related to project management and also throw in a bunch of other useful features like file sharing and separate communication. All these functionalities are streamlined and clear.

To handle finding temporary housing for contingent workers, establish clear guidelines, partner with reputable housing providers, communicate openly with workers about their needs and regularly review and adapt the housing arrangements.

Allowing for simpler collaboration

The products we have listed above set up great foundations for project management. They engage in more robust activities, especially with remote teams, and require a more robust productivity-based infrastructure. 

Keeping in mind the necessities of a contingent workforce environment, cloud-based tools that allow remote access and rich productivity seem like an excellent remedy for this issue. This is especially important for cloud collaboration apps. They are usually rooted in subscription-based or pay-as-you-go models which makes them fit for contingent team management.

Ensuring a greater level of flexibility and scalability

All the technological solutions used for the management of your contingent work teams need to feature a satisfying level of scalability. We have seen how that works in the context of cloud-based productivity apps. 

These standards need to be applicable to all other assets as well. Contingent teams deal with specific tasks and projects usually in a very limited time frame. So sometimes it means managing several teams at once and cutting them loose the very next day. Therefore your tools need to allow that level of scalability.

Summing up 

We hope this short breakdown gave you a general idea about the strategies you can use to find the best technological tools for the management of your contingent teams as well as presented a couple of areas where you should start looking for apt solutions. 

The present-day business environment is growing faster, leaner, and more relentless with each passing day. Keeping up with this merciless pace will become very hard without heavier reliance on a contingent workforce. The suggestions we gave you should lay the foundation for this type of collaboration.