How to best handle the latest trends such as remote work?
The permanent job is disappearing. Almost all of the jobs that have been created since 2005 are considered temporary positions. Cost wise, this clearly helps companies out. Full time employees are expensive and make scaling up or down difficult in an increasingly volatile global business environment. However, this definitely raises questions for company productivity, especially growing companies. Turnover has for a long time been considered a hindrance to company success, so where do contract and part-time workers fit into the equation?
How can companies best manage this new work style and benefit, whilst avoiding the pitfalls?
Remote work trend is becoming expected by professionals as well.
Many experts are choosing to become contract workers or are expecting remote and part-time work options. Here are a few things companies, big or small, should take into consideration in the coming years as this trend continues to become the norm.
Why?
You can outsource what’s not your core competency
The biggest way your company can benefit from contract and part-time work is that you can focus on hiring solely for your core competency. The benefit to contract workers is that they can work with multiple clients, further developing their skill while your company doesn’t have to waste time branching from what you do best either. It’s efficiency at it’s best. There is a new generation of workers – especially in technical roles – who are used to agreements like this and don’t expect (or even want) full-time jobs. Full-time hiring can and should revolve around what your company needs to do best.
You can hire the absolute best for the supportive work
In many companies, when a new project or problem comes up, someone existing at the company needs to figure it out. This may mean hours of learning a new skill or researching a way to address something your current employees aren’t well versed in. With new technology popping up frequently, your team needs to be able to keep up. Headhunting for highly talented individuals isn’t necessary. You can hire a contract or freelance expert for a project or one portion of your business. You’ll get quality work and save massive amounts of time. When you have experts helping you with supporting activities, not only do you save time and money, but you retain quality work across the board by hiring the best, not recruiting.
Top engagement, all the time
A long time focus on all business columns is employee engagement, how it relates to productivity, and how to keep it high. When you hire a contract employee to use their skill to help a part of your business, they are doing exactly what they’re good at and, presumably, love to do. It’s not about clocking in hours and leaving at the end of the day. The flexibility and specification make the work about quality and performance. Your contract employees are generally going to be the most engaged and productive members of your team. Their experience outside of your project will be an added benefit to you as well.
How?
Digitalize communication and organization
This is mainly for those older companies rather than small, tech-savvy startups. Onboarding and managing without a team that have a good grasp of digital communication is difficult enough. There have been countless articles and studies covering how to keep employees engaged over the years. With short-term employment, part-time, and remote employees, it’s even more important to have streamlined communication and digitized processes. Updating your communication process alone can make working with contractors, freelancers, and part time employees even more efficient. Siloed methods like email and conference calls are outdated and unproductive.
Use a company chat and task management platform to manage work in your office.
Be updated with the latest remote work trends!
You will be better prepared to take on contract workers and freelancers if your team isn’t relying on siloed and disorganized communication. Hibox is a perfect all-in-one solutions for chatting and managing tasks as a team.
Start building a trusted network
Contract or freelance workers don’t always need to be a new person you have to introduce to your process each time. Building up relationships with freelance or part time experts that you work with on a consistent basis is the best way to get the familiarity of a full-time employee with the benefits of a freelancer. Most freelancers love ongoing projects. Their diverse experience from other projects will serve you as well. Start building relationships with a contract worker for different skills you regularly need for projects to always have an expert on hand.
Over the next few years, this trend will become more and more common as bigger companies realize that ‘more’ isn’t always better. The quick changing tide of business and technology will force companies to stay small and expand as they need to. More and more experts will start to expect part-time contracts and remote work. The companies that will succeed in the future are the ones who will learn how to take advantage of this now.
