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Supporting the contingent workforce in the new normal

Our previous blog series, the 7 Pillars of HR Leadership, described the seven most pressing HR challenges, trends, and opportunities in front of organizations as they adjust to the ‘new normal.’ In this series, we describe how the right enterprise software can help you make the most of these opportunities. It’s clear that the new normal brought about by COVID-19 and its aftermath will change workforce norms even more — in this blog we discuss how to best support your contingent workforce so they can help your company achieve its goals.

Why a contingent workforce?

Staffing agencies, consulting companies, freelancers, and others have long been part of the modern talent pool. According to the 2018 External Workforce Insights Report, created in part by Oxford Economics:

42 percent of workforce spend is used to hire and support contingent workers and service providers.

Almost 60 percent of executives said the external workforce helped them compete in a digital world.

74 percent of executives reported that the external workforce was critical to operating at full capacity.

Reacting to new limitations in movement

For some industries, mobility of workers is an additional challenge for organizations trying to maintain staffing levels. Travel restrictions, for example, require HR departments to consider hiring from local populations rather than recruiting globally. Beyond travel restrictions, companies must also consider worker health and wellbeing, regardless of whether they hire an employee or a contingent worker.

Working from home presents unique challenges for employees and employers alike, but regardless of the reality, communication is key if a company is to remain successful and its team committed. Effective communication includes the ability to collaborate — sharing documents, sending messages, and accessing information. With more visibility into the external workforce, employers must be able to remain connected with all their workers as health and safety concerns rise.

How can SAP Fieldglass External Talent Management help?

SAP Fieldglass External Talent Marketplace is a solution designed to help you find, recruit, and hire the workers you need to keep your business running. You can post jobs for which candidates can apply, and you can search the pool of available workers to find a match best suited for your company’s needs.

Workforce management in a post-pandemic world

While it is too early to predict exactly what will happen as COVID-19 recedes, more organizations will likely realize the strategic value of external workers. As SAP Fieldglass general manager Arun Srinivasan has put it, a solid external-workforce strategy that complements your broader workforce approach is what helps companies thrive in the best of cases and survive in challenging ones. In this fast-evolving market, companies are finding strategic ways to differentiate, and eventually organizations will look at their entire talent pool to find the best people for the job. One thing is certain: the way work gets done has forever changed.

How the right HR technology helps

In our previous blog series, the 7 Pillars of HR Leadership, we described the seven most pressing HR challenges, trends, and opportunities in front of organizations as they adjust to the ‘new normal.’ In this series, we describe how the right enterprise software can help you make the most of these opportunities.

Even with the best connectivity tools and internet connections, working from home presents unique challenges for employees. There are activities and processes that an e-mail message can’t replace — but the right HR technology can help. In this blog we examine the main challenges to current processes created by remote working, and describe how you can configure your HR technology to enhance workflow and improve morale and the overall employee experience.

The employee at home

For many employees, making a request with HR was as simple as taking a few steps to the HR office and speaking to a colleague in person. With many HR professionals working from home, employees must now resort to sending e-mail messages or completing broken forms, with little transparency into the progress of the request or its status.

The right HR solution lets you organize all your communication onto a single secure platform — employees can use their computers or mobile devices to make requests, which are automatically funneled to the right team, and they can monitor the status of each request as it gets processed.

The challenge — HR requests must now be made online: e-mail messages are unclear and unmanaged; contact forms are inadequate and lack security; and it is difficult to track the progress of requests.

How a modern HR solution can help:

Create an ‘all-in-one’ portal for employees to get information, make requests, and track progress.
Let employees use their personal or company devices to request support.
Offer support in the form of messages, text chat, voice chat, or tickets.
Categorize requests into customized groups to fit your company processes.
Collect, anonymize, and use request data in reporting to help with future business strategy.

SAP solutions such as SAP SuccessFactors Employee Central and the Employee Central Service Center have the functionality to deliver this.

The HR professional at home

The HR organization is central to a well-functioning company — an important link between leadership and employees, communicating policies, providing guidance, and gauging sentiment. To succeed, HR professionals need to be master communicators, brimming with knowledge, with superior organizational skills. Working from home challenges how these competencies are best expressed, since the ‘immediacy’ of the office environment can no longer be leveraged. A modern HR solution lets you bring all management tasks to a single, secure platform.

The challenge — all HR activities must be conducted remotely: virtual meetings are sub-optimal; it is hard to store and secure confidential employee and company records; requests of all sorts sit in an inbox; information is located across multiple devices; and it is hard to gauge employee sentiment.

How a modern HR solution can help:

An all-in-one suite of functionality with a secure document repository and access control, so only authorized people get access.
Information accessible immediately from any device.
An electronic knowledge base storing answers to common questions and steps to HR procedures, categorized and indexed for optimal search.
The ability to route HR tickets to the right person or group, enable collaboration, complete administrative tasks, and create tickets on behalf of employees.
A self-service portal so employees can get information, make requests, and track progress from any device.
Social collaboration as another communication channel.

More about SAP Jam Collaboration. Working from home presents unique challenges for employees and employers alike, but regardless of the reality, communication is key if a company is to remain successful and its team committed. Effective communication includes the ability to collaborate — sharing documents, sending messages, and accessing information. SAP Jam Collaboration is a platform that can help everyone at your business stay connected: communicate (broadcast messaging across the company or between teams, and share files and information); engage (keep your workforce informed and committed by facilitating communication among all levels); and succeed (when employees are informed they are better prepared for any changes that come their way).

SAP Jam’s proven results

According to a Forrester study, The Total Economic Impact™ of SAP Jam, users experienced the following benefits:

16% decrease in time-to-access of information and expertise.
73% reduction in IT labor related to managing the corporate intranet.
19% reduction in the cost and time to train and onboard new employees.
14% faster time-to-resolution for internal support issues.

The study also determined that there was a true transformation in organizational culture through the removal of barriers and hierarchies, increased accountability among employees, and improved access to information.

The HR analyst at home

In the past, insight came from qualified yet qualitative experience, which at the end of the day amounted to nothing but ‘gut feeling.’ While there is something to be said for an individual’s personal analysis, technology provides an opportunity to gain deeper insight using many more data points. Everything can be measured — from log-in time to duration spent on a request to employee sentiment on a new policy — and with more information you can make more accurate assessments about your current reality and uncover opportunities for innovation.

Types of reporting you can do include HR service-delivery analytics (understand what employees are requesting, levels of importance, and the ability to solve problems), employee interaction reports (configure and generate reports on employee requests), HR service-quality reporting (improve your team’s response through SLA reports and dashboards), and compliance reporting (run SLA compliance reports to uncover opportunities for improvement).

Tag: HR Technology

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