Make your teams of consultants more flexible - Post-Covid

If this article could have been written before the covid-19 crisis, the latter has had a major impact on the organization of work, and it's becoming more urgent than ever to react: the consulting companies that will win after the crisis are those that know how to create a competitive advantage around the flexibility of their talent. The pessimists on the subject of flexibility and remote working of talent were forced to work in this way during the confinement, and have come to realize that it works much better than they had hoped. A return to business-as-usual is not an option when 73% of French employees hope to continue teleworking. How can we turn this shift into a competitive advantage that will enable us to work with the best talent and better position ourselves in the face of competition from other consulting firms? A number of major global trends are making this transformation inevitable. This change is a real opportunity to work with the best talent in a more agile and cost-effective way, by creating an in-house platform of freelance consultants. However, you need to be well organized and well-equipped to ensure that this advantage is quickly realized.

1) 4 major trends are prompting service and consulting companies to review their internal organization

When the planets align to send a message, it's hard to turn a blind eye to the obvious. 4 major trends confirm the need for all companies, and even more so for consulting and service companies, to review their talent base and create more agile teams that make remote working a strength rather than a difficulty.

1a) The economy is increasingly volatile

The economy is increasingly volatile and less predictable. Uncertainties about the scale of the Coronavirus crisis are high. In France, the current situation is being compared to the post-war period. The French recession looks set to be the deepest in the entire Eurozone, mainly for structural reasons linked to unemployment management. Many were the sorcerers' apprentices who had been predicting a crisis since...2015. Of course, a cycle reversal was to be expected, but who thought that a health crisis would bring the world to its knees? No one envisaged a more violent crisis than that of 2008, and yet... This volatility and lack of foresight is nothing new, but the scale of the crises and their rapid spread across the planet are new factors. In 2008, we thought we had experienced the crisis of the century, but 12 years on, it seems that the scale of the pandemic-related crisis will be even greater. Every company must take this volatility into account and adapt its business model to better absorb shocks. Bringing greater flexibility to its teams by integrating external talent is the best possible approach.

1b) Talent increasingly wants to work as freelancers

At the same time, a not new trend is gathering pace: the scarcity of talent looking for permanent contracts. In the USA, over 35% of the working population is already freelance. Before the pandemic, this was expected to rise to 50% by 2025. But the crisis seems to be accelerating this phenomenon. When asked about their future, the cohorts of young talent laid off en masse by Airbnb, Uber and Lyft say they aspire to sell their skills independently and remain in control of their careers. This trend is also gaining momentum in France, where more than 15% of the workforce is already freelance.

1c) Skills are evolving faster and faster

Technology-driven business transformation is drastically accelerating the evolution of skills. Consulting firms need to be prepared for this, as they will be in the front line when it comes to meeting their customers' needs. It is widely estimated that 65% of children entering elementary school today will be working in a job that doesn't yet exist when they leave school. In such a fast-changing environment, it's vital to put skills planning and management at the heart of a consultancy's strategy. But it's impossible to recruit talent that covers the full range of skills, and working with external talent on a regular basis is an excellent option to address this issue.

1d) Customers demand ever more specific skills

Customers, too, are more demanding than ever when it comes to requesting specific skills to address their issues. With a plethora of independent talent now at their fingertips, thanks in particular to the emergence of consulting platforms, it is becoming necessary for consulting companies to review their approach from the point of view of their teams. Many choose to internalize their more generalist talent, while creating a pool of external or expert talent, which ensures that they always have the right resource to meet customer needs, while bringing in the more specialized skills that promote project success and the long-term growth of these consulting companies.

These trends existed before the crisis, but the latter has only accelerated them. The rapid rise in short-time working confirms that bringing more flexibility to your teams with a pool of externals makes a lot of sense. 47% of new graduates say they want to work as freelancers rather than looking for a job with a company. The shock of confinement is accelerating the digitalization of companies and the accompanying evolution in skills. As a result, customers of consulting firms are looking for more specific expertise.

2) Numerous advantages for consulting firms in creating and working with a pool of external talent

Consulting firms that embrace flexibility by mixing internal and external talent on their projects are better able to win out over the competition. This requires the creation of an organizational structure based on in-house consultants who form the core of the company and provide the skills most regularly in demand to address customer issues. This base of consultants needs to be supplemented by a pool of expert freelancers who bring much more technical and specific skills to the table. These are skills that are less regularly in demand, but which enable us to innovate more effectively to solve our customers' problems. Without ever competing with in-house consultants, these experts are called upon to collaborate with consultants when their expertise proves relevant to a project.

Flexibilizing your teams in this way, by mixing in-house consultants with external talent, has many advantages:

2a) Innovate faster and respond better to customer needs

With the ability to immediately source the expertise needed to solve a problem, the speed of innovation offered to consultancy clients is multiplied. Innovation is a company's main source of growth. In a study, McKinsey analyzed the performance of 3,000 companies to understand what makes companies fail and disappear. The study shows that 92% of the companies that stayed alive during the 32-year study had average growth rates of 20% or more. The vast majority of this growth is created by the capacity for innovation that only companies with access to the right skills and expertise are able to deploy.

2b) Reduce risks and generate savings

Financially, this approach to creating hybrid teams offers a number of advantages. Firstly, working regularly with an independent external talent base offers resource flexibility that can absorb growth shocks. The increasingly volatile economy requires us to identify ways of reducing risk, and this approach is one of them. Especially as the massive recourse to short-time working and the long-term impact it will have on the country's debt could lead to reforms designed to reduce companies' dependence on the government. Furthermore, in the event of a shock and redundancies, restructuring costs can sometimes be substantial. In times of recovery, recruitment costs can also be high. The approach recommended here both avoids the risks associated with a lack of flexibility when business falls off sharply, and significantly reduces the costs associated with restructuring the organization.

2c) Better engage and retain talent

The creation of hybrid teams also enables us to concentrate our efforts on engaging and retaining the talent we hire. By calling on outsiders to support in-house teams on certain tasks, it's easier to offer interesting and formative assignments to in-house teams. Allowing them to focus on higher value-added tasks not only keeps them more interested, but also enables them to develop their skills more rapidly in key areas such as project management and customer management.

3) What are the steps involved in creating a flexible workforce and a pool of freelance consultants?

3a) Build a pool of experts

Moving from an in-house workforce to hybrid, agile teams means gradually creating a "pool" of external talent with whom your company will have privileged links, frequent exchanges and with whom you will work regularly on projects. Whether your pool consists of 10, 50 or 500 experts, it's important to create it as quickly as possible. Identifying this external talent has become very simple: whether on LinkedIn or on the various external consultant platforms, you'll be able to find serious, qualified freelancers whom you can put to the test on one or more projects. Once you've confirmed the good performance of one of these external talents, integrate them into your "pool", and make sure you call on them as much as possible when their skills are needed to solve a customer's problem. Over time, they'll adapt better and better to your processes and working methods, develop closer ties with your in-house teams, and their performance will only increase.

3b) Monitor and manage your community of external freelance talent

Once you've created your pool of external talent, it's time to animate it, so as to continue to forge links and encourage them to prioritize your projects. Animating your freelance community is less complicated than it sounds. The number-one expectation of these talents is, of course, to have sustained activity. Give them visibility of upcoming projects they could be working on. Some companies send out job boards in weekly newsletters, while others do so with their resource management solutions, such as Stafiz. Once the project is finished, it's also important to evaluate the freelancers you work with. Tracking evaluations in the resource planning solution allows you to confirm the alignment of planned skills with reality. Finally, maintaining a community of external talent with whom you work on a regular basis also means bringing them together once or twice a year and mixing them with your internal teams. Some consulting firms invite their pool of external talent to short seminars, during which they can meet the firm's management and exchange views with in-house consultants. This proximity encourages the commitment of these external talents and encourages them to choose to work with these companies when they have to choose between several possible projects.

3c) Save money by automating management

While working with freelance talent offers enormous financial benefits thanks to the flexibility it provides, managing a pool of freelancers can create additional work for finance and HR teams. Contract management, time and expense tracking, invoicing and payment: keeping track of freelance talent can quickly turn into a nightmare if you don't have the right tools. That's why you need a solution that enables you to manage both internal and external resources. The Stafiz ERP and scheduling solution, for example, enables you to offer external talent the opportunity to participate in projects via workflow, to automate the management of subcontractor contracts, and to manage time, scheduling and invoicing directly within the tool. The time savings and clarity this brings generate significant savings, since the time allocated to managing externals is considerably reduced. What's more, by "integrating" the management of your pool of externals, you avoid paying commissions to freelance platforms, which can range from 10% to 25% commission applied to Average Daily Rates, which can quickly become very expensive.

Conclusion:

In conclusion, the crisis engendered by the pandemic will have accelerated an inescapable shift that requires the management of consulting firms to adopt a more flexible approach to their internal organization, so as to be better armed and better positioned for the future. Coupling a broad base of in-house consultants with a pool of external consultants appears to be an excellent model for creating solid competitive advantages.

This model seems so relevant that all the major consulting firms are adopting it.

The Big Four have already created their own internal platforms for freelance consultants, making it much easier for them to draw on the skills of data scientists, cloud architects, DevOps, Scrum masters, etc., all of which require specialized skills. Last September, Deloitte launched Open Talent, PwC its PwC Talent Exchange platform and KPMG its KPMG's Freelance Portal pool. The trend is still hesitant in France, but much less so in Anglo-Saxon countries, which are further ahead on the subject. Deloitte Australia, for example, works with 15% to 20% freelancers on each of its projects.(read Consultor's article on the subject)

All consulting companies have a real interest in creating their own pool of external talent. Not to compete with their in-house consultants, but to respond ever more effectively to customer issues and make the right shift towards the future of work. The flexibility, agility and financial gains this brings is the icing on the cake!

An interview with the Calyans consulting firm