Are you in the process of expanding your external workforce? Does your company work with freelancers and independent contractors?
According to reports, 80% of large corporations are planning to change their recruitment strategies to utilize more non-traditional workers in the coming years.
Building an external workforce has numerous advantages. From allowing for more lean operations to facilitating easier scaling, tapping into the gig economy is an all-round win.
However, there is one area where companies are facing problems. This is disorganized workforce management.
Managing a decentralized workforce requires a centralized, highly organized approach.
Are your hiring managers are jumping between twenty applications to manage their freelancers? This is a huge waste of time. It also results in almost zero visibility into projects and external resources.
Fortunately, you can put an end to this. Keep reading to find out why it’s imperative to get organized around workforce management and how to start.
Why Flexible Workforce Management Is More Complex
Remote working and freelancing has been on the rise for some time, and the pandemic has only but fast-tracked this shift.
All of a sudden companies are having to manage rapidly dispersing teams. This has caught many organizations a bit off-guard.
Before, managers dealt with teams under one in-house roof. They did this through established processes and systems.
Now they’re scrambling to hire, communicate with, and oversee fluid teams. To do this, they often end up having to jump around between a myriad of tools, platforms, and virtual workspaces.
Not only does this eat up valuable time, but it’s also a recipe for confusion and mistakes.
Managing a flexible workforce is inherently more complex. If you don’t get organized, the administrative side of an external workforce can quickly become a morass of siloed information.
The last thing any organization wants is to have administrative processes straddling tools that don’t talk to each other.
In an entirely in-house setting, this can still work to a degree. But as soon as you have external teams distributed over the country or globe—things can get very inefficient and messy.
Next thing you know external team members aren’t going through an onboarding process, signing the right documents, etc. etc.
Cobbling Tools Together Is Not the Answer
If hiring managers don’t have an organized process for working with external teams, they start cobbling tools together.
For instance, your recruiting team might be relying on a combination of an Excel spreadsheet (or ten), LinkedIn, Upwork, and Gmail. For business organization, your managers might be jumping between a mix of Trello, Slack, Gmail, Excel, Google Drive, and Microsoft 365.
There are a few reasons why this type of “tool cobbling” is not the answer.
It Silos Information and Robs You of Visibility
For one, it disperses and silos information.
Besides wasting time, this can also result in miscommunications.
It also provides a complete lack of visibility over projects and external teams.
If you want to find out the status on a project, you’ll have to speak to the applicable manager. They then might need to contact the various external team members to get an accurate progress report. Depending on the size of the team and the time zones it operates in, this could take hours or days.
Cobbling Tools Wastes Vast Amounts of Time
Lastly, cobbling together tools also wastes managers’ focus and energy. Having to jump back and forth between tools is very disruptive and decreases concentration levels.
Research has shown that it can take almost half an hour for humans to regain focus after their workflow is disrupted.
This squanders team managers’ and hiring managers’ energies. It also wastes the time of anyone else who needs to gain visibility into a project’s status.
Disorganized Workforce Management Will Keep You at the Back of the Pack
Besides robbing managers of time and eroding visibility around projects and external resources—disorganized workforce management will also keep you at the back of the pack.
If you want to stay ahead of the competition, it’s essential that you start streamlining external workforce management.
Currently, only a handful of organizations utilize a specialized digital platform to consolidate their external workforce management processes. But this is likely to change quickly over the coming years.
As companies see the pitfalls of disorganized management processes, they’re going to look for solutions. Once they implement these, they will gain the competitive advantage.
Not only will they save time, but they’ll also be able to better source and organize top external talent. This allows companies to pivot, scale, save resources, forecast talent needs, etc.
If your hiring managers are still cobbling tools together, you’re going to lose the competitive edge.
How to Start Organizing External Workforce Management
If you want to start organizing external workforce management, you need to migrate to a tailored solution like JobBliss.
JobBliss is a freelancer/contractor management system. We provide companies with the tools to build, manage, and track their external workforce.
With JobBliss you can:
- Unite internal and external teams
- Scale activities like support and task reporting
- Access project management tools
- Forecast your external workforce needs
- Source freelance talent from the JobBliss marketplace
- Build and consolidate your company’s external talent database
- Access a single source of truth for data
- Remove information silos
- Accurately report and access up-to-date activity and project data
- …And more
JobBliss revolutionizes the way companies hire. With the old way, hiring managers have to go through dozens of different steps just to get the point of onboarding a freelance hire.
With JobBliss you can skip unnecessary steps. Such as manually checking past projects for potential freelancers to “rehire”.
Instead, hiring managers can view external resources at a glance in your external talent database. If there isn’t suitable talent for a new project, they can simply browse the JobBliss marketplace.
From here, onboarding steps are streamlined to the point of being virtually hands-free. Once new talent starts, hiring managers, team managers, and anyone else can ascertain their performance at a glance.
Bring Your External Workforce Management Into the Future With JobBliss
External workforce management can become an administrative nightmare if you don’t organize it right. Are your hiring managers still cobbling tools together to get things done?
Are they knee-deep in an Excel spreadsheet swamp? Or worse relying on paper lists and word of mouth?
If the answer is yes, then you need JobBliss. JobBliss is your one-stop solution for building and managing your external workforce. With JobBliss your project teams will get access to a single source of truth. As well as clear, centralized visibility over projects and external talent.
Sign up for a 30-day free trial and bring your external workforce management into the future.
