Flexible Staffing Strategy Part 1: Understand the Current Workforce
Flexible staffing is a concept adopted by many organizations, in which they hire contingent workers only after analyzing their dynamic business workload.
The supplement to their permanent workers implemented, strategically helps maximize their profits and productivity. This concept was first recognized by the U.S. Department of Labor in 1999. In this report, they compared the ‘just-in-time’ concept of inventory control in manufacturing by using flexible staffing in order to provide just-in-time labor.
According to the report, “Employers that have flexibility in adjusting labor requirements to meet product and service demands have a competitive edge over those with less flexible human resource policies. Flexible staffing arrangements undeniably increase business competitiveness”.
However, in order to maximize the benefits of your flexible staffing solution, you need to follow the below mentioned steps:
- Understand your current workforce / manpower
- Understand your company’s dynamic workload
- Balance your current workforce with the dynamic workload
Let us start with the first step:
Understand the current workforce
To start with, you should understand and analyze your current, permanent workforce that is vital for your organization’s success. The question, however, is how would you determine which of your permanent workers play a key role in the success of your business?
The value of your permanent employees is based on the role that the employees play in your organization and the contribution they make to their respective role.
Another factor that you need to consider for applying flexible workforce strategy is to identify whether your organization is overstaffed or understaffed. Executives have adopted many tactics in order to determine whether their organization is overstaffed or understaffed. One of the tactics is the ‘fast walking technique’.
If your employee is simply strolling down to his/her seat instead of walking at a fast pace, it is likely that your organization is overstaffed and that the respective employee has less amount of work.
While analyzing your workforce, you should also keep in mind the 80/20 rule which applies to the productivity of your workforce. Studies reveal that employees generally work with 80% effort while 20% of their effort remains untapped.
Hence, if your workforce has the right skills, right knowledge and the right behaviors, the resultant productivity will be just 50%. Surprising right! This is because, productivity is the result of a mix of your employee’s skill, knowledge and behavior, which sums up into just 50%.
The next step that you have to take while applying flexible workforce is to understand your dynamic workload, a discussion we will embark upon in our next post.
If, however, you face difficulties in knowing how exactly understanding the manpower can help in maximizing the benefits of flexible staffing services, talk to our experts at 1-877-747-4224 or fill in the contact form.