As we discussed in the first part of this blog, HR or Procurement: Who Should Manage Contingent Workers (Part 1)?, the increasing use of contingent workers means it’s more important now than ever before to implement successful non-employee workforce management processes.
An important part in creating this procedure comes down to answering the question of who should manage non-employee workers. Should it be your company’s HR or procurement team?
In fact, management of your contingent workers should be a company-wide initiative that makes the most of a vendor management system (VMS) to effectively consolidate your staffing agencies and non-employee workers in one centralized location.
While these two paths have different priorities, they should both align to your overall corporate goal.
In this second part of this blog, we are going to discuss some of the complexities of managing contingent workers in more detail, why that means management processes should be a company-wide initiative and how the use of a VMS solution will help.
What are the complexities of managing non-employee workers?
Managing a workforce of non-employee workers is highly complex. A non-employee workforce involves dozens of vendors, hundreds of contingent workers, thousands of transactions and a huge amount of data.
Many businesses with smaller contingent workforce spend (anywhere in the region of $1m to $10m) are using manual spreadsheets, in-house databases and Sharepoint-type websites to manage this data. Yet this isn’t an effective method, and leads to a lack of visibility into your non-employee workforce.
Without true visibility into your non-employee workers, and the vendors you use to source them, your business will be wasting money on poor hiring decisions, wasting time on inefficient processes instead of automating tasks, overspending on vendors and will have no transparency on vendor performance.
To compound these challenges even further, many organizations have fragmented non-employee management processes across their organization.
Not clearly defining which department (that’s if your business has both HR and procurement staff) is responsible for managing these workers leads to a non-centralized approach in which hiring managers choose vendors and pay contingent workers at rates which they believe is a fair price - not the predetermined and approved rate that has been chosen by your company.
This results in a haphazard and inconsistent approach that prevents your business from gaining true visibility into your non-employee workforce management program.
That’s why non-employee workforce management should be a company-wide initiative
To gain true visibility into your non-employee workforce and the vendors you use to source them, it’s crucial to define which department is responsible for the management of it.
Due to its complex nature that involves both vendor management and worker relations, it’s advisable that both your head of HR and procurement department work together to successfully manage your temporary workforce.
Procurement can use its expertise in managing vendor relationships to analyze and evaluate staffing agency performance and costs, while HR can use its skill of managing people to ensure contingent workers have a great experience with your company - increasing the likelihood they will work with you again on future projects, ensure there is cultural alignment with the workers hired, and ensure there is strong candidate experience that affects the employment brand in a positive way.
It is also critical that HR have input into the overall workforce, be it contingent workers or full time, to ensure proper workforce planning and to provide consistent support to the business end users.
By managing the non-employee workforce together, HR and procurement can create procedures and processes that make temporary workforce management a company-wide initiative.
A vendor management system (VMS) will help your organization achieve this
It’s important to remember, as we discussed above, that your HR and procurement teams cannot manage this workforce without the help from innovative technology.
To help organizations with smaller non-employee workforce management spend, Conexis VMS has developed the very first vendor management system designed to automate and consolidate the entire non-employee workforce and staffing agency management process, with no minimum spend requirements.
The use of a VMS will automate and consolidate your entire non-employee management and staffing agency process in one centralized platform. As a result, your HR and procurement departments will be able to seamlessly manage the entire non-employee workforce process across all departments, giving your business complete visibility into performance and cost.
A vendor management system that automates and consolidates the entire non-employee and staffing agency process will allow your HR and procurement department to seamlessly manage this entire process with complete visibility across your organization.
As a result, you’ll be able to make better vendor choices, mitigate the risks associated with the non-employee workforce and significantly reduce costs such as overpaying for vendors.
Want to learn exactly how a vendor management system will improve how you manage non-employee workers? Contact Conexis VMS today. We would love to answer any questions you have about our innovative vendor management system.
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