What is Workforce Management (and Where Does Your Contingent Workforce Fit In)?

Workforce Management: Back to Basics

The concept of Workforce Management isn’t new. It emerged in the 1980s as businesses sought to rationalise processes and production cycles, demanding better organisation. Today, in the digital age, WFM is crucial for structuring and anticipating staffing needs effectively, aligning with employer goals, team capacities, and legal requirements.

Effective WFM requires juggling numerous factors:

• For HR Departments: Managing employment contracts, skills, development goals, collective agreements, rest periods, compliance, and varying hour requirements – complexities that multiply when dealing with temporary staff and external contractors.
• For Managers: Balancing activity peaks and troughs, seasonality, holidays, training, and absences (planned or unplanned) to ensure the right resources – permanent or contingent – are always available to meet objectives.
• For Workers (Internal & External): Adapting to work demands alongside personal constraints and preferences, seeking flexibility and predictability.

In this dynamic environment, WFM aims to optimise staff planning, boost productivity, control labour costs, and ensure teams are correctly sized to deliver the best possible service.

The Objectives and Benefits of Effective Workforce Management

Your people, whether permanent employees or skilled contingent workers, are your most valuable asset. Effective management of this blended workforce is strategically vital. It ensures you have the right number of people with the right skills available precisely when needed to support your operations and customers.

The benefits of a strong WFM strategy, encompassing both internal and external workforces, are significant:

• Improved Efficiency: Better allocation of all available staff resources.
• Optimised Planning: More accurate scheduling and forecasting of labour needs.
• Increased Agility: Greater flexibility to respond to changing demands by efficiently engaging contingent workers.
• Cost Reduction: Avoiding under or overstaffing by right-sizing teams, including optimising spend on temporary labour.
• Enhanced Customer Service: Ensuring sufficient staff coverage to meet demand consistently.
• Reduced Worker Dissatisfaction: Fairer distribution of workloads and schedules can improve retention and engagement across the board.

How Modern Tools Optimise Your Contingent Workforce Management

Managing a workforce, especially one that includes temporary staff, freelancers, and service providers, requires significant effort. Manually tracking availability, ensuring compliance, managing suppliers, and handling invoicing for external workers can divert managers from higher-value strategic tasks.

This is where a Vendor Management System (VMS) like Pixid VMS becomes essential. While traditional WFM systems focus heavily on internal employees, a VMS specialises in streamlining the complexities of your external workforce.

Pixid VMS, designed for the dynamic needs of the European and UK mid-market, offers a fast-to-deploy and easy-to-use solution to manage your contingent staffing effectively. Rather than replacing your internal HR systems, it integrates or works alongside them, providing crucial capabilities:

• Visibility & Control: Gain a clear view of your contingent workforce, including spending, supplier performance, and worker assignments.
• Efficiency: Automate workflows for requisitioning, candidate submission, onboarding, timesheet approval, and invoicing, saving significant administrative time.
• Compliance: Helps ensure adherence to labour laws and contractual agreements for temporary workers across different regions.
• Supplier Management: Efficiently manage relationships and contracts with staffing agencies and other labour providers.
• Speed & Agility: Quickly source and engage temporary talent to meet fluctuating demands, ensuring business continuity.

By using a dedicated VMS like Pixid VMS, you can effectively manage a crucial segment of your overall workforce, ensuring you have the right external skills available when needed, compliantly and cost-effectively.

Pixid’s Perspective

For truly effective Workforce Management in today’s flexible working world, managing your contingent workforce efficiently is no longer optional, it’s critical. A VMS like Pixid VMS provides the dedicated tools needed to handle the unique challenges of sourcing, engaging, and managing temporary staff and external contractors.
It complements your existing HR infrastructure, providing the control, visibility, and efficiency required to optimise this vital part of your workforce. By integrating your contingent staffing management seamlessly into your broader WFM strategy with Pixid VMS, you empower your organisation to be more agile, compliant, and cost-effective – ready to meet any challenge.