For many complex scheduling environments that depend on their employees 24 hours a day, seven days a week, organizations are investing in contingent workers to fill in gaps when needed.
Manufacturing accounted for 38% of the US temporary staffing market in 2016, representing the largest chunk of industries utilizing temp workers and contractors. A Contingent Labor survey by Accenture found that a typical energy company’s workforce is made up of 30-50% of contingent workers.
Despite a dependence on temporary labor, they are not being fully integrated into the day-to-day flow like permanent, full-time employees. In fact, Deloitte’s 2018 Human Capital Trends Survey reported that only 16% of oil and gas respondents claim to have a well-defined strategy for their hybrid workforce in place.
Your contingent staff needs defined performance goals and proper training. Temp workers and contractors should be subjected to the same cultural norms that full-time employees adhere to, and there are safety hazards to consider when employees are receiving disjointed training.
It’s time to integrate your temp workers fully into your scheduling and skills evaluation process. And it’s easier said than done! Here’s how.
Mitigate Rogue Spend
Picture this: you’re the COO of a food and beverage company, and a new lemonade is about to hit the market in time for summer. You need to have a chat with HR about your intended production needs, and there are three ways you can viably go about getting more manpower to hit these production targets. You can either a) leverage your best, most qualified employees and have them put in overtime hours; b) hire new, full-time workers and train them specifically for this product line; or c) bring on some temporary workers to work exclusively on the product launch.
If your current scheduling process doesn’t act on real-time workforce analytics, you’re not going to be sure which option is best. For example, you could choose Option A, only to realize that previously unmonitored overtime hours are now through the roof and it actually would have been cheaper to just onboard new people part-time.
With our workforce management system, Indeavor, you’ll have increased visibility into employee availability and preferences. Indeavor’s automated scheduling software creates efficiencies and reduces errors, allowing you to meet labor demand at the point of scheduling—no matter how volatile demand is.
Monitor Performance (and Keep Compliant)
Only employees with the right certifications/permissions should be scheduled for specific tasks. It’s easy to lose track of employee qualifications and certifications, however, when you host all your employee information in an Excel spreadsheet or on paper. Or if you desperately need to fill a scheduling vacancy and are happy with just about anyone who is available.
If information on your permanent workforce is scattered, then it’s safe to assume that certifications for your contingent staff are as well. But contingent employees are still employees, and their information should be hosted in the same place as everyone else’s.
You need a fully functional and integrated qualification management system (QMS) that automatically breaks down the skills across your entire workforce and allocates the right person for the job. Schedulers can ensure that they assign the most qualified workers to each position at the click of a button. They can even search and identify the most optimal employees for the shift based on specific skills certifications. By having all the information centralized, even the temp worker scheduled for the shortest period of time will be easily integrated.
The Indeavor Solution
Our workforce management SaaS solution which offers clients an end-to-end, cloud-based employee scheduling, time & attendance, and absence management system. With Indeavor, you can easily streamline the integration of your contingent workforce with your permanent employees.
Click here to request a demo.
