A contract workforce gives you the flexibility to expand and contract your workforce based on your business needs. But when employees are constantly added and removed from your workforce, it can be a challenge to manage this process efficiently since it touches many divisions within the company, from Operations to IT to Finance.
Let us look at how each of these divisions are impacted by contract workers and what steps can be taken to address those challenges.
Operations
If most of your contract workers are in the field where direct supervision may not be possible, it is a real management challenge. Contract workers may be delivering materials to your key customers or visiting your customers to install your products or addressing product issues in the field. Therefore on-demand visibility into field operations and efficient scheduling and job dispatch are critical. One solution is to use cloud-based software to capture all communications, schedules and monitor field locations and times of all your field activities in real-time. Not only will it help you manage your mobile workforce but it also provides you will valuable data that will give you insights into how you can further optimize your operations.
IT
As contract workers come and go, you have to provide them with devices or phones to communicate with headquarters. The gaining acceptance of BYOD (Bring Your Own Device) makes it easier for IT since the company can now interact with workers through their phones with secure, on-demand provisioning of business applications on these phones. With requisite worker permissions, an app or network-based service can capture events in the field such as employee location, job site checkins / checkouts, safety alarms and physical world events based alerts thus helping companies to improve management of their field operations. IT needs solutions that make it easy to deploy and leverage BYOD quickly no matter what phones (cell or regular smartphone or feature phone, any carrier) workers have. Employees need to easily start using various relevant company mobile apps & services without requiring overwhelming training. Furthermore, it would of great advantage if the app/service requires limited or zero-touch interaction in the field.
Finance
Processing payrolls for contract workers requires them to turn in their time cards which can be error prone and incorrect. An automated solution such as zero-touch time clocking where worker hours are obtained without the worker needing to input that information would be ideal. This will eliminate inaccuracies and save a significant amount of time compared to a traditionally manual process. Payroll processing for contract workers will be a lot easier with this approach.
Many companies consider their contract and mobile workforce as a key element in their operations. An integrated approach to managing contract workers that addresses inefficiencies in Operations, IT and Finance can be a huge advantage to any organization.