To compete in the global market, companies are pushing talent management beyond the confines of the enterprise wall to include the new extended workforce. This is a global network of outside contractors, vendors, strategic partners, outsourcing partners, and other unconventional workers.
Nick Hess, a Portland IT consulting professional with SureTec IT recommends utilizing the opportunities of both the extended workforce and conventional employees, organizations gain critical advantages, including agility and access to valuable talent.
Remote workers are becoming commonplace these days. It wasn’t always that way before the COVID-19. This crisis has narrowed the income potential from conventional full-time work that many people are turning to projects, consultancies, and part-time jobs. The remote workforce has given rise to the extended workforce, which is introducing new avenues that bring previously unconnected supply and demand together.
Companies are implementing their own versions of this approach through the extended enterprise, which selects employees on criteria wherever they are. Organizations that have applied this technique have multiple advantages over their brick-and-mortar counterparts. Benefits include increased productivity, enhanced efficiency, and attracting more well-qualified talent. Companies practicing the enterprise distributed workforce are positioning themselves well for the future.
Timely Benefit for Business
The extended workforce or enterprise distributed workforce is enabling companies to achieve two of the most sought-after competitive capabilities: agility in times of turbulent business environment and access to high-performing, highly skilled talent. These two capabilities are the essence of success.
In the highly competitive global market, timing in marketing makes the difference between success and failure. The enterprise distributed workforce enables talent to be brought in just in time for business to hit the ground running without time-consuming training. This enables companies to get a product or service out in front of the competition. Also, an organization is able to quickly adjust to changing global demand patterns, scale employees up and down fast and efficiently according to shifts in demand in various parts of the world.
The Adoption of Private Networks
As more and more people work remotely as part of the enterprise distributed workforce, networks continue to grow due to workers sharing documents over the cloud. So private networks are layered on top of existing networks. This approach is widely used that the VPN market is estimated to reap increased profits. VPN enables anyone with access to a company’s protected connection to have access to the private network. To make it more secure, some VPNs are based on privileges and permissions.
Managing Enterprise Distributed Workforce
The rise of remote workers calls for creating new organizational structures or roles that cross boundaries and disciplines. Anyone from any department be it from finance, legal to sales can be assigned responsibility for the enterprise distributed workforce. But HR plays the central role. For example, an organization forms a steering committee that comprises representatives from sales, human resources, and operations departments to manage the company’s extended workforce.
HR collaborates with other functions that also have a stake in the distributed workforce. HR creates jobs that fit a diverse array of skills typically found in different functions. New extended workforce manager roles are created and staffed with people who have skills not typically found in any job description. Such skills include contract negotiation and talent organizational management. An enterprise distributed workforce talent management department can even be created that reports directly to the executive level.
Talent Acquisition
An increasingly critical HR capability for managing the enterprise distributed workforce is knowing when to use which talent pools for which tasks. HR personnel needs to perform fact-based analysis in making staffing decisions across the talent pool. Use data from a variety of sources to identify labor trends for different talent pools and geographic markets. Organizations should also foster closer relationships with talent suppliers.
