5 Ways to Ensure Your Business Establishes Contingent Worker Inclusion

The contingent workforce. Extended talent. Temporary workers. The externally-sourced workforce. Gig workers. Consultants, contractors, freelancers, project-based workers. All of these are different labels for anyone who works for a company and isn’t classified as a permanent employee.

The ratio of this workforce is growing for most organizations. In fact, research from Gartner suggests that 32 percent of organizations are replacing full-time employees with contingent workers.

Contingent workers now represent an important opportunity for businesses to stay competitive, access the top talent in their industry, improve business flexibility, build a highly-scalable workforce and reduce workforce costs. 

Yet contingent workers are often underutilized and undervalued. These workers are typically seen as “temps” that simply come into an organization, do a job, and then leave. Team leaders often don’t understand how important these workers are to the success of their business. 

With workers becoming increasingly hard to source due to the “Great Resignation”, businesses must now make a conscious effort to become an “employer of choice” for the contingent workforce. 

Businesses need to position themselves as the first choice for contingent workers, and build a strong relationship with those workers so that they can be re-engaged over and over again as-and-when needed.

To do that, organizations must focus on contingent worker inclusion. Here are a few tips to follow so your business can avoid excluding such an important part of its workforce.

Unlike your permanent employees, contingent workers aren’t legally entitled to benefits. Doing so could leave your business vulnerable to co-employment or misclassification. However, that doesn’t mean that your contingent workers shouldn’t be recognized for good-quality work.

Provide positive feedback to contingent workers and give them the opportunity to work with your business again on new contracts or projects. This will increase the likelihood that talented contingent workers will want to work for your business again, or even recommend you as an employer to their fellow contingent workers.

To understand the true value and ROI of your contingent workers, you need to gain complete visibility into your entire workforce. To strategically optimize the skills in your organization, it’s important that you have visibility into skill count, headcount and future needs.

Visibility starts with a strong system of record into your workforce. A Vendor Management System and strategic MSP program will give your organization the visibility and control it needs over its contingent workforce - allowing you to fully understand the value you're receiving from your externally-sourced workers.

Everybody wants to feel like their work is important. Just because contingent workers are temporary, doesn’t mean that they don’t want to feel like they matter. Contingent workers still want to be included in your organization's culture, and understand the role they play in your success. 

Companies should pay attention to their company culture. For a successful contingent workforce program, it’s crucial that both permanent employees and contingent workers are integrated into your business seamlessly. 

Contingent workers come into your business for a specific period of time or to fulfill a particular project. Once that’s finished, they leave your organization and find a new job. Because of this, it can be easy to fall into the trap of believing that contingent workers don’t particularly care about your company’s goal.

This couldn’t be more wrong. The most valuable contingent workers will care about your goals, values, objectives and overall mission. In fact, by selling these values to contingent workers, you can work towards re-engaging the top talent over and over again. 

Contingent workers are able to choose the projects they work on and the companies they work for. To be able to access the top talent in your industry, you need to build strong relationships with these workers so that you can not only re-engage them for roles in the future, but also so they recommend your brand to their peers. 

Building strong relationships with contingent workers will ensure they feel included during their time with your organization and improve the likelihood that they’ll want to work with you again.

Interested in learning more about contingent workforce inclusion and how you can better manage your externally-sourced workforce? Get in touch with Contrax today. We would love to help.