Harnessing Your Fluid Workforce

In mid-2019, prior to COVID-19, organizations were already decreasing their share of traditional, full-time employees. In a report by The Economic Intelligence Unit, more than 60% of companies expected their share of contract labor to grow through 2024, and 63% agreed that their companies couldn’t meet strategic goals without gig workers. At the time, the main motivators for using contractors over full-time employees included increasing productivity and reducing labor costs.

Of course, this study took place just prior to COVID-19, and contract and gig workers are only one component of a truly fluid workforce. We define “fluid workforce” as one in which organizations take advantage of a wide range of employment and work structures to meet real-time business needs.

Fluid workforces may be essential in today’s circumstances, but they require a new way of thinking about employees and how organizations recruit, manage, and develop relationships with them. For this reason, fluid workforces are more complex than traditional ones, and demand a more intelligent infrastructure powered by technology and automation. This post discusses a few approaches for building a more fluid workforce, including employee sharing and redeployment, rapid talent assembly, and a non-FTE-friendly employee experience.

Employee Sharing and Redeployment

According to Cornell University research, many European countries trialed “employer groups” prior to COVID-19. Employer groups are companies in the same or adjacent industries that share full-time workers who are deployed to the partner organizations as needed. North American companies such as Hilton adopted like-minded approaches in the wake of COVID-19, offered employees to essential retailers like Amazon, Walgreens, and Stop & Shop.

While they could be reskilling concerns associated with employee sharing – cleaning hotel rooms is different than cleaning a warehouse – job responsibilities will often be similar enough to redeploy people easily. There’s also the matter of figuring out how the arrangement will work with a chorus of self-interested partners. But employee sharing provides an alternative to layoffs and keep people involved with your organization so they can return to their original jobs if and when circumstances change. It’s a helpful cushion for industries that are impacted both positively and negatively by disruption.

Employee sharing can take place internally, too. In the wake of the pandemic, more organizations are rethinking whether they can be more flexible in how they deploy full-time employees. As an example in the early months of the pandemic, Karyn Schoenbart, CEO of market research firm NPD, assembled her leadership team to assess the company’s most pressing business needs. She learned that due to current market conditions, her beauty practice was stagnant while her food practice was dangerously overworked.

NPD moved employees from the beauty practice to the food practice, teaching them what they needed to know along the way. And even though NPD paused all external hiring, the company held onto its recruiters – also redeployed to help with internal matchmaking.

Schoenbart governs a small-to-medium-sized business, so employee sharing and redeployment can occur on a conversation basis. But for enterprises, HCM software solutions can help reassign labor where it’s needed now and track where it will be needed next.

Rapid Talent Assembly

In a more fluid workforce, instead of relying on traditional employees to perform most responsibilities in person, organizations may adopt a new approach to quickly construct diverse teams in response to immediate business requirements. I call this rapid talent assembly.

These short-term swarm teams include human employees of all types – temporary, contract, and virtual employees, consultants, and subject matter experts – and machines like software, bots, and algorithms.

To start a rapid talent assembly implementation, leaders must seek to understand their essential and non-essential roles in the context of the current business climate and where ROI is being generated – as NPD’s Schoenbart did. Current employees with all forms of employment arrangements can answer a survey detailing their skills, competencies, credentials, and interests.

Alternatively, some HCM platforms offer a “single record, single system” proposition that enables both internal and external workers to complete a Talent Profile. Candidates complete these when applying for positions and iterate upon them as they progress through the employee lifecycle. Leaders can use this data to create a skills matrix aligning people resources with crucial roles, better manage the employee experience and internal talent pools, and weave in learning pathways, succession planning, churn risk, and performance evaluation.

Since gig workers are a fundamental part of tomorrow’s talent assembly, organizations that don’t have a robust pipeline of reliable contract employees may want to leverage technology to build one. As an example, The Washington Post Talent Network – which is part social network and part job board – gives Post editors an easy way to solicit and hire external writers for blogs, breaking news, and long features across a variety of departments.

The platform includes freelancer profiles that detail professional experience and incorporate work samples. Editors post assignments and freelancers tailor ideas to specific departments and editorial initiatives. Post full-time staff can even use the system to track the locations of their gig writers so they can quickly deploy talent in the event of breaking news.

But staffing a swarm team is only one part of rapid talent assembly. For a group of employees that have never worked together before to engage and operate effectively, leaders must develop a supportive infrastructure. HCM software can help you provide the appropriate oversight and project management, rapport building, collaboration, and success metrics that will keep your swarm teams moving in the right direction.

A Non-FTE-Friendly Employee Experience

Although employee experience has become a focus of most HR functions over the last few decades, typically this is limited to full-time employees. The employee experience for other types of workers is an afterthought.

This is a mistake. After all, contract workers are usually given the same level of access as full-time workers. This means that they could be interfacing with sensitive company data and customers without the proper background context and training. Just like FTEs, gig workers must be onboarded so they understand organization messaging and protocols and don’t inadvertently make errors that cost you business – or worse, your reputation.

In crafting an employee experience for non-FTEs, you should also consider the different needs of these groups. For example, in the U.S., contract workers are distinguished from full-time employees in a variety of ways. Among other stipulations, gig workers are employed on a per-project basis, they are employed by many other companies or individuals, they use their own tools and resources to complete work tasks, and there is little to no supervision on their work hours or requirements. If you misclassify contract workers as FTEs or vice versa, you’ll run afoul of state and federal laws and find yourself subject to huge penalties.

Promoting an inclusive culture is at the heart of an effective employee experience, but most organizations still don’t include non-FTEs in these efforts. If leaders want to attract high-caliber non-FTEs and keep them loyal and available to work with you time and again, this has to change.

The first step is to stop treating non-FTEs like second class citizens, and fair and equal pay is only one aspect of this. You must also craft an employee experience that’s specifically tailored to each type of non-FTE and spans the entire lifecycle. These groups must be recruited, onboarded, trained, and engaged with in a manner that makes them feel like fully included team members. Fortunately, smart HCM platforms can assist in customizing and managing parallel experience tracks at scale. 

And, although there are limits to the support leaders can provide to people with the contract worker distinction, seek to understand what motivates your FTEs and deliver those things as best you can. Show you respect their contributions by providing extra attention as well as recognition, rewards and tokens of appreciation when warranted. At a time when most of your competitors are neglecting their non-FTEs, your experience will be unique and appealing. 

Employee sharing and redeployment, rapid talent assembly, and a non-FTE-friendly employee experience are important elements of the fluid workforce of the future. By powering them all, intelligent HCM software and automation frees up human business and HR leaders to strategize and calibrate the best talent mix.