Flexible Staffing Strategy Part 2: Understand the Dynamic Workload
Flexible staffing strategy can be implemented successfully by understanding the different patterns and variations of your workload, a point that we will be discussing in this post.
In our previous post, we discussed the first step – understanding the workforce that will help maximize the benefits of flexible staffing.
Understand the dynamic workload
Ups and downs are a part of every business, which also has a great impact on the workload of an organization. Workload swings are intimately connected with the staffing strategies you implement.
However, many organizations fail to analyze the dynamic patterns of their workload. Furthermore, they also fail to analyze how well their current staffing strategies sync with these dynamic patterns of their workload.
If you have an idea of the changing patterns of your workload, then it will help you plan out and implement the workforce requirements that are in sync with your dynamic workload.
When you adopt this proactive approach of flexible staffing – blending permanent workforce and contingent staffing, you will see that it results in increase in profit and ROI.
To better understand this step, let us take a hypothetical example of a company where the executives plan to implement flexible staffing after analyzing their dynamic workload:
A company has a highly variable workload, which they have been managing quite effectively with the help of predominant contingent staff. Their labor costs closely matched with that of the revenue earned. However, this may pose as a problem if the business projections were showing strong booking in the upcoming years.
Keeping in mind these projections, it would be good if key casual staff and their organizational knowledge is locked in – either by offering them permanent part-time or full time jobs.
In order to know whether this theory will prove right, they analyzed a few things: existing and historical relationships between staffing levels and workload variations, identified realistic productivity targets based on current practice, actual cost of permanent and flexible staffing.
Based on these analytics, they reached the following conclusions:
- Small increase in the permanent staffing levels would optimize costs
- Increasing the permanent part-time job offerings to contingent workers is a favorable staffing strategy
- Improving retention and loss of operational knowledge
- Identification of costly disruptions to the normal staffing level-workload relationship – valuable management information
The next step that you need to take is to balance your workforce and the dynamic workload, a step that we will be discussing in our next post.
For more information on how you can analyze your dynamic workload for better implementation of flexible staffing services, talk to our staffing experts at 1-877-RISHABH (1-877-747-4224) or fill in the contact form.