The Power of Optimization Across the Entire Workforce–Including Extended Workers

This blog was originally posted on vndly.com in January 2023. 

It’s increasingly clear that the future of work will rely heavily on the extended workforce. As companies adopt contingent labor as a major part of their total workforce strategy, technology that provides essential visibility across all workers has never been more crucial. A fully integrated human capital management (HCM) solution and vendor management system (VMS) can provide your company with everything it needs to keep pace in this shifting landscape. 

Our solutions operate seamlessly together to provide the technology you need to support the workforce of today and tomorrow. The native connection between our HCM and VMS is the first step toward a total workforce strategy, and as we learn more about the future of work, we will continue to plan our product roadmap to meet these needs. 

Strengthening the Power of Employees With the Flexibility of the Extended Workforce

Effectively utilizing contingent labor has huge business benefits. Extended workers offer flexibility to easily scale the workforce up and down depending on market conditions, which reduces costs and increases agility. Contingent workers also play an important role by giving leaders access to specialized skills that may not exist in their full-time workforce. With the increased value of combining in-house talent with external skill sets, companies need tools in place to effectively manage the workforce in its entirety. 

As we look to the future of work, organizational agility is expected to be increasingly critical for success. But to achieve this goal, you have to be able to build and serve your total global workforce, both employees and contingent labor. The tools used to manage this changing workforce are pivotal in achieving real results. We want to empower you to create organizational agility that will equate to organizational success.

We have long recognized this need for flexible technology to support the management of the contingent workforce—from onboarding to offboarding. To help you remain competitive, increase organizational agility, and optimize your total workforce, we are committed to providing practical, customizable workforce technology. 

Workday as a Hub: The Power of Connections

By leveraging the combined capabilities of our HCM and VMS solutions, your company will benefit from automated and streamlined processes to manage all worker types. Operating in a “hub” model, in which Workday serves as a central location for all data relating to your workforce, our HCM and VMS solutions provide a seamless user experience, increasing user adoption and supporting organizations across key areas such as: 

• Data efficacy and reporting
• Workforce planning, strategy, and spend
• On- and offboarding processes
• Security and compliance 
• Total workforce visibility

One of our greatest strengths is our forward-thinking and agile approach. Our goal is to build products that anticipate the future needs of our clients—a driving force behind Workday’s acquisition of VNDLY. 

Developing Technology to Support Total Workforce Strategic Focus

To help your organization prepare for tomorrow’s problems, we are creating a path to offer customers a total workforce solution that delivers a connected experience across workforce management and talent. We’re helping you get ready for the future with two key innovative features: 

1. Unified workforce operations: We’ll continue to equip organizations with a central place to manage all extended workers. This includes the freedom to direct-source extended labor, provide required learning and safety training to these workers, and manage and report on total workforce data in Workday. We aim to help customers build a talent pool that can be tapped into to meet seasonal demand, while still making it simple to convert someone to a full-time employee, manage compliance, and proactively adjust to the changing regulatory environment. 
2. Workforce optimization powered by machine learning (ML): We continue to find ways to infuse ML throughout the user experience, empowering our VMS to make recommendations that will support workforce planning. These recommendations are based on retention rates, loaded labor costs, and skills requirements—making it easier for your team to determine whether to hire a full-time employee or extended worker for a role. And we are continuing to look at more in-depth business scenarios that could benefit from further leveraging company data through ML and artificial intelligence.

With this focus on total workforce optimization, your company needs a platform that will provide the power to adapt. We know the future of work encompasses more than traditional employees. Our goal is to empower you to bring external workers into the fold across your business processes and plan at your own pace in line with your operational objectives, while maintaining the flexibility to pivot quickly in the face of swift macroeconomic change. Ultimately, we aim to provide your organization with the agility, insights, and experience you need to lead your total workforce into the future.