This article, written by Hyoun Park, CEO and principal analyst at Amalgam Insights, first appeared at Amalgam Insights and is republished with permission.
Businesses face the challenge of managing a variety of workforce issues across the wide variety of people at the company: freelancers, outsourcing firms, consultants, contingent labor, and full-time labor. The United States Government Accountability Office estimates that about 40% of workers are not full-time workers and fall within a variety of roles including contractors, part-time workers, and on-call workers that may track time through different systems and methods.
With this challenge in mind, companies need a comprehensive management view that automates processes and helps them focus on conducting work more quickly—rather than being mired in a sea of paperwork and processes. No longer simply a matter of managing active full-time employees, workforce management must now support a comprehensive practice across contingent, part-time, full-time, and other categories of workers.
To effectively leverage their hybrid workforce across financial, operational, and management capacities, companies must consolidate workforce management tasks onto a single platform and a consistent set of data to avoid constant switching back and forth across tools and data types. This platform should include contingent labor, internal labor, time and payroll, workforce scheduling, financial budgeting, employee engagement, and onboarding capabilities, including governance, risk, and compliance management across all areas. Data across all of these areas should ideally be within a single data store that provides a shared version of the truth for all stakeholders across human resources, finance, and line-of-business management roles.
Amalgam Insights believes the following needs should be considered in developing a comprehensive workforce management system.
Managing payroll, performance, and relevant benefits for employees, consultants, and freelancers.
Workforce management efforts must consider the combination of standard payroll systems, time and attendance systems, scheduling systems, contingent labor management, on-demand services, third-party temporary labor and consulting firms, and self-employed contractors. In doing so, companies must decide which benefits and services are consistent across various labor types and what resources are needed to maximize the productivity of each class of workers. Regardless of labor type, compensation must be timely, accurate, and provided depending on contractual agreements based on relevant labor law. By managing all classes of workers across a shared and consistent set of characteristics, companies may be better positioned to see if there are part-time or contingent workers who should be made full-time employees or to see which tasks are better supported by specific workers, skill sets, geographies, shifts, and other identifying work characteristics.