Why should firms use blended workforce ?

 

Introduction:

In the current business environment, firms have several options on how they could structure their workforce efficiently. The days where firms struggling with permanent workers are gone. With the Gig economy, organizations can have better flexibility and visibility on their workforce. The current situation with the spread of the coronavirus has taught organizations that they need a workforce that can provide agility to their business and access in-demand skills when required. We believe this can be achieved through a blended workforce; this way firms can access skilled talent at a lesser cost.

Why should firms start using blended working?

When it comes to hiring talent in a blended workforce, the world is the playground, and firms can access top skills from anywhere across the globe. According to a Career Builder survey, “40% of employers will hire full-time staff this year and 30% plan to hire part-time, contractors or freelance workers.” On average firms spend $50,000 on hiring an employee however, the cost can rise to $70,000 when you include benefits and administrative costs.  Organizations don’t have the flexibility to change or remove their employees from work due to strict labour laws.  Which makes it difficult to update their firms with a skilled workforce. By hiring a blended workforce, large organizations can save millions in expenditure. In addition to saving money, a blended workforce can help firms to maintain a competitive advantage by having access to skilled talent on demand. Also, firms can manage a mix of full-timers, part-timers, freelancers, contractors, and consultants without any long-term commitment. This can ignite a sense of competition among the workers and can be used as an advantage for companies by leveraging the most value for money. Also, full-time employees tend to have an entitlement to their job. With a blended workforce, everyone has a reason to work hard to provide high-quality output as this could help the workers to extend their contract or land a full-time job. Another advantage of having a blended workforce is the creative work environment. This can create an opportunity among workers for cross-functional collaborations, peer mentoring to generate unique ideas and improve the internal organization’s knowledge base.

Benefits of a blended workforce:

Lower staffing costs: Factors like health insurance, yearly bonuses, and severance packages can be avoided by firms. This helps firms to cut costs by not having to pay for extra perks for its employees apart from the base salary. Companies have the flexibility to put on hold their workforce at the time of crisis or recession. This could help firms to stay afloat by reducing staffing overheads significantly. Hiring workers with unique skill sets: When the job requirement becomes more specific, firms have a hard time finding the right candidate with a traditional job search. With the help of the gig economy, firms can hire talents with an eclectic skill set and can work with unorthodox work schedules to achieve organizational goals. E.g. Hiring an employee who can speak 3 different languages with no long-term commitment has become much more comfortable than before with the help of advanced freelance platforms to hire workers. Diversity and innovation: The blended workforce provides the opportunity for a firm to diversify itself and the project they work on by adding innovation and creativity in daily office routines. A blended workforce offers the best of both worlds in the workforce. Combining full-time and part-time employees can provide a unique combination of work output. At the same time, adding stability to the brand by fostering a better relationship with its stakeholders. Happier staff: Since qualified part-time experts are hired for work, it makes your internal workforce less stressed in dealing with issues outside their area of expertise, and the contractual employees can take care of those problems. Studies suggest that Contingent workers are much happier than full-time employees because of the feel-good factor about profiting their expertise with sound business acumen. This leads to a better work-life balance for them.

Challenges involved in blended workforce:

The blended workforce may seem it’s loaded with lots of benefits as you reap, but there are some significant challenges to deal with while implementing a blended workforce. Remote working: If the firm has people working from different time zones, managing them remotely is going to be a difficult task. Building an active collaboration with your internal workforce and remote workers can be challenging. With the advancement in process automation software like Stafiz, managers can implement them in their blended workforce to reap the benefits. Tracking compensation: When the firm uses a blended workforce, monitoring and paying hourly workers, salaried workers, and others based on fair compensation becomes difficult.  However, with Stafiz’s Time tracking feature, the job of tracking employees and paying them according to the hours they’ve worked is made easy. Schedule coordination: Making freelancers work as per the firm’s own schedule is not possible, and they won’t be available for regular working hours like the other employees. This becomes a challenging task when you want to communicate the deliverables you expect from them and to convey organization goals to keep your blended workforce on the same page. Culture shocks: Creating an influential positive company culture among contingent workers and internal employees can be challenging as they work for a short time in the firm. While talents from the gig economy tend to bring unique experiences and skills, they also bring past work situations to the workplace. Sometimes this might create negativity among permanent and temporary employees that could affect the company culture.

Conclusion:

The bottom line, as a blended workforce extends and becomes more diverse, it gets difficult to manage. It is the right solution for temporary staffing for firms looking for a flexible workforce that can be more valuable for companies. In this COVID-19 era, implementing a blended workforce can drive growth by enabling firms to cut costs, add new skills to their workforce. With proper planning and execution, a blended workforce can be more productive, efficient, and creative for organizations. In our next blog, let’s dive deep into managing a blended workforce.

References:

https://www.wonolo.com/blog/what-is-a-blended-workforce