What a year 2020 has been. With the swift spread of COVID, even the most progressive of organisations were thrust face to face with their limitations. If you were lucky (read: forward-thinking) enough, you will have passed the first steps with relative ease: 

Send people home to work remotely – check. 

Have the infrastructure already in place to enable this – check. 

While it seems to be what most LinkedIn posts and business articles are speaking about, it’s not the transition to a work from home (WFH) situation that is the biggest challenge for your workforce in this crisis. 

It’s the management of that workforce. 

It’s Time to Adopt Agile Practices 

As news comes out on the long-term impacts of this crisis, the general consensus is that organisations are going to need to continue to streamline their supply chain, solutions, operations and workforce to keep costs down, profits up and doors open. 

It’s at this time that those who don’t have a contingent workforce will be considering the benefits of adopting one, and those who do, will be wishing they had an eagle eye view to manage it effectively. 

Your contingent workforce, in theory, allows you to access the best people when you need them and avoid paying staffing costs when you don’t. But the reality for many businesses is that their contingent workforce setup is messy. There are workers in departments all over the place, on contracts from various agencies, and there is no centralised way to plan, manage and manoeuvre this workforce for optimum performance and savings. 

A managed service provider (MSP) turns your chaos into clarity. 

5 Business Saving Benefits of an MSP For Your Contingent Workforce 

1. Visibility

When numbers need to be crunched, visibility becomes the mantra directed at HR departments under pressure. With an MSP managing your contingent workforce, you can gain full visibility of all the contractors in your organisation through a central vendor management system (VMS). 

2. Workplace Health and Safety

Moving an entire workforce to a WFH setup is no easy feat. Even if you had everything in the cloud and all of your staff had company laptops and equipment, the workplace health and safety (WHS) standards are hard to meet for a workforce that is not centrally managed. An MSP takes care of this responsibility and uses their oversight of the entire contingent workforce to ensure all contingent staff are taken care of with ergonomic WFH setups and other workplace health and safety standards.

3. Single Point of Contact

With a single point of contact managing your contingent workforce, you can gain quick insight into the numbers of workers you have on the books and can make more informed, strategic decisions about how to utilise them effectively through a single point of contact. With contingent workers through multiple agencies, communication can become a fulltime job—a job you can’t afford in a crisis. 

4. Compliance

Once again, with the benefit of central management, there are no risks of oversight and non-compliance. Every onboarding and offboarding activity is conducted for every contractor, consistently. This is particularly important when onboarding and offboarding remotely.

5. Cost Savings

During a crisis, cost-saving is critical. With clarity on your contingent workforce, you can make better decisions that benefit the bottom line for your company. Streamlining this process on its own immediately saves costs in varying agency fees. Then, an MSP also saves costs by allowing you to staff more effectively and quickly assess what changes could be made if you needed to reduce costs quickly while maintaining peak performance. 

Launch Talent Solutions provide bespoke solutions that drive better talent outcomes. For more than a decade, we have been working with Australian organisations to steer their business through crisis’. 

Contact us today to discuss how we can help you through this one.