As your workforce grows to include a more diverse mix of employees, contractors, and freelancers, you’ll need to revisit your strategies for hiring, contracting, and managing them. The coordination of these activities is what a study by the MIT Sloan Management Review and Deloitte calls “workforce ecosystem orchestration.” As the study found, this strategy requires the effective coordination of the people, technology, and processes that comprise your extended and interconnected workforce.
In this blog post, learn more about the study and how Worksome’s tools can help you leverage your workforce ecosystem more effectively.
A Recap of MIT Sloan Management Review and Deloitte Findings
Over the course of their three-year Future of the Workforce study, MIT Sloan Management Review (MIT-SMR) and Deloitte identified the modern workforce ecosystem as a blend of employees and external contributors. They stressed that these contributors must be managed holistically with the help of key internal stakeholders such as Finance, HR, and Procurement. Most organizational leaders agreed. In the study’s most recent survey, 86% of global business leaders said the effective management of external contributors was critical to their organization’s overall performance.
The survey also revealed that in half of the organizations surveyed, a third of the work was being performed by external workers. Given the sizeable contribution of external workers in many organizations today, the MIT-SMR and Deloitte researchers recommend changes in the following areas:
Management practices
Identify new methods for talent acquisition, development, and retention that effectively incorporate the extended workforce.
Technology enablement
Use data and technology to break down internal silos and make it easier to contract, deploy, and manage external workers.
Integration architecture
Increase collaboration between functional areas like HR, Procurement, and Legal, thus limiting redundancy and conflict in how external workers are hired, managed, and paid.
Leadership approach
Refine leadership behaviors to include integrating external workers into the company culture.
How Worksome Helps Companies Orchestrate the Workforce Ecosystem
Workforce management technology enables better decision-making, compliance, and internal collaboration. And when you need a technology solution for managing external talent as part of your broader workforce ecosystem, Worksome is custom-built for exactly that.
Here are three ways Worksome helps organizations orchestrate the workforce ecosystem more effectively:
1. Supports consistent talent acquisition and management practices
Whether you work with staffing agencies, talent marketplaces, or employ a direct sourcing model, the Worksome platform can help your organization build and curate an external talent pool for every function and geography. Using a single platform, you can:
- Find global freelancer talent
- Search and filter worker profile data
- Collaborate internally with in-platform messaging
- Make well-informed hiring decisions in one click
2. Offers innovative tech functionality and integrations
Worksome tools deliver complete visibility into the costs and operations of your external workforce. The solution offers the following data and reporting functionality to help you manage your workforce ecosystem more efficiently:
- 24/7 dashboards
- Global contractor and freelancer cost reporting
- Detailed worker profiles and contract data
Additionally, the software syncs to other platforms you already use. Worksome’s open API, out-of-the-box integrations, and customization flexibility allow you to push or pull external workforce data to and from your own systems, whether it’s Workday, Netsuite, Trello, or any other enterprise platform.
3. Enables cross-functional collaboration
Worksome is designed to help organizations minimize risk, simplify administrative workflows, and manage the costs of the external workforce. Here’s how the platform helps internal functional areas collaborate and coordinate the external worker lifecycle more consistently:
- HR: Automates external worker sourcing, management, and payroll. The software can also be configured to give hiring managers internal permissions to hire freelancers and contractors.
- Procurement: Enables freelancer background checks and automates payment processes in 150+ countries and counting.
- Finance: Offers anytime viewing and reporting of external worker contracts and payments.
- Compliance, Tax, and Legal: Properly classifies external workers according to applicable law, and creates internationally-compliant contracts.
Manage Your Entire Workforce Ecosystem
As you increasingly rely on contingent workers to fill talent gaps and advance critical projects, you need the right systems and processes to help you find, hire, and manage them as part of your broader talent management strategy.
Worksome’s external workforce management tools make it easy. With a single platform, you can find, contract, and pay contractors and freelancers, in full compliance with applicable laws wherever you hire. Contact us for a demo and see how our all-in-one platform can help you manage your workforce ecosystem more effectively.