Workforce Management Featured Article
Workforce Management Shifts Toward Total Talent Management
There are many different effective ways to manage your workforce today. Workforce management solutions can help you make the most of your human assets, and become part of an increasingly popular strategy known as “human capital management.” HCM is a bigger umbrella than workforce management, because it generally includes management of non-employed workers.
Non-employed workers may include temporary workers who are brought on board through a staffing agency or part of an internal pool of workers; independent contractors and freelancers (both onsite and remote); consultants, outsourced workers (both on-site and offshore) and even “non-human” assets as the use of automation (think artificial intelligence or robotics) escalates in the average company today.
Unfortunately, most companies don’t have the visibility or integration to manage employee and non-employee assets across the entire enterprise, according to a recent article by John Nurthen, Executive Director, Global Research, Staffing Industry Analysts, writing for the UK newspaper The Daily Telegraph.
“Weighing up these various options and determining what type of talent is most effective in delivering a particular work output from a cost-quality-risk perspective is hard enough, but is made much more complex given lack of co-ordination and visibility among HR, procurement, finance and line management,” he wrote. “Putting together the right sourcing model to deliver the optimal workforce mix is a very complex process.”
Automation will be necessary to get this mix right, and Nurthern noted that it’s time for the IT department to let software do more of the work. While a human touch will always be required for effective management, it’s simply too large a job to leave to humans, and no single manager can ever maintain an accurate picture of the entire workforce. To complicate the issue, vendor services and technology for the employed and non-employed parts of the workforce have, so far, developed mostly separately. For companies looking to get more out of their workforces and increase efficiency and save money (and talent), the time has arrived when something needs to be done about workforce management.
“A more joined-up approach is referred to as total talent management (TTM) and means sourcing, managing and incentivizing the total workforce in a more proactive and holistic fashion, not just the employed part,” wrote Nurthern. “Staffing firms and others have been developing TTM solutions to address this need over the past few years but uptake is tentative and this still remains very much at the cutting edge of workforce management.”
Forward-thinking companies have been trying to get a handle on the “big picture” of their customers for years in a process called “the omnichannel customer experience.” Today, they face similar challenges to “omnichannel” their workforces, building in automation where it’s warranted, and improve hiring, training, quality monitoring, reviewing, scheduling and adherence across the entirety of their employee and non-employee base. The results may require years of transformation and a number of broad software solutions, but in the long run, they will help companies of all sizes to get more out of their critical workforce assets.
Edited by Alicia Young