On Thursday, June 21st, from 2:00 - 3:00 PM CDT, HotGigs is presenting a webinar featuring Elaine Taylor, a nationally known subject matter expert in the area of contingent workforce management (CWM). She will be presenting on the specific topic of minimizing your co-employment risks, a highly relevant topic to every company that makes use of contract workers. Registration is free.
Elaine has authored a number of guest posts for our HiringExchange blog, previously covering topics such as the ROI of soft cost management, hidden costs of contingent staffing, and identifying and mitigating workforce risk. In her current post, she addresses CWM success factors.
Client companies that are just beginning to develop their CWM strategy often ask me:
What is the most critical element of a successful CWM program?
They generally expect me to respond with "reducing bill rates" or "mitigating risk" or "reengineering convoluted and costly business processes"; but invariably, my answer is:
Achieving 100% adoption of your program by the managers who engage contingent workers.
Why is adoption so critical? Because, if you stop to think about it, you can design and implement a strategy for reducing bill rates, for mitigating risk, for saving soft costs by streamlining business processes...but if very few managers comply with your program, your measurable results will be negligible.
For example, in order to achieve an executive mandate for "expense reduction", the Procurement Department of one of my clients undertook a year-long RFP project that resulted in the selection of five primary staffing suppliers who contracted for specific bill rates that the Procurement Department assured the CFO would result in a 23% cost savings over the next year. Needless to say, the executive sponsor was very enthusiastic. But a full eighteen months after the rollout of the five primary suppliers, only two percent of the company’s contingent staffing spend was going through these five suppliers. Only 2%! So after wasting a year (and many man-hours) on the RFP, they had achieved virtually no cost savings at all...and they were forced to start from square one with developing a strategy that would satisfy the executive mandate.
That's one example of the "why" of "achieving 100% user adoption".
The "how" involves two primary factors:
- Design your program for adoptability and adaptability
- Line up executive support
Design Your Program for Adoptability and Adaptability
In real estate, the mantra is “location, location, location.” In CWM it is, “adoption, adoption, adoption.” No matter how much tender loving care you invest in the design of your CWM strategy, your efforts will be a waste of time and resources if only a limited number of managers comply with the requirements of your CWM program.
And, of course, virtually every organization has its entrepreneurs who want to do things their own way and not be hampered by bureaucratic, meaningless processes. (Who can blame them?!) While the goal of CWM is first and foremost to save money and to protect the company, those end results will not be achieved if managers focus their time and energy on figuring out ways to bypass the program.
To achieve 100% adoption – and to avoid "management by exception" – you must design and implement a CWM program that meets your clients' needs 100% of the time. (NOTE: This is not the same thing as “giving them everything they want".)
Here are the four strategies that I consistently recommend:
a) Simplify the user’s life. Reengineer and streamline business processes with the goal of reducing the manager’s administrative burden rather than complicating it with low-reward, convoluted processes.
b) First and foremost, consider the users’ needs. Choose a supplier model that ensures client satisfaction.
c) Use a "carrot and a stick" approach. Market the benefits of using corporate contracted suppliers; but put “teeth” in your program for those who will “resist out of principle." (Once they understand the risks and costs they personally assume by working outside the official guidelines, managers are likely to become enthusiastic supporters of a well-designed CWM program.)
d) Listen to what the users say. Incorporate a formal feedback loop that ensures the continual process improvements inherent in any successful program.
And even when you do all these things, don’t be surprised if you still encounter a hard- fought battle to “win the hearts and minds” of your user community. Achieving 100% user adoption is never easy!
Line Up Executive Support
The second-most important factor in the rapid, successful adoption of your new CWM program is executive-level sponsorship. You must enlist the support of not one executive...but of all the executives who are key stakeholders:
a) SVP, Human Resources
b) Assistant General Counsel
c) CFO
d) Chief Procurement Officer
e) CIO (very important because within most corporations, IT spends – by far – the greatest sum on contingent workers/contractors/professional services)
While most executives will put their clout behind cost-saving measures, few of them are fully up to speed on the potentially significant soft costs savings associated with risk mitigation (specifically, "misclassification of employees"), and with eliminating business process redundancies and inefficiencies. Make certain you are fully conversant on these issues; then make it a priority to educate your executive supporters.
A word of caution on executive support: In my experience, I’ve almost always found it easy to get an executive to commit their support after I’ve given a compelling presentation on all the reasons a comprehensive CWM strategy will benefit the corporation. But receiving a verbal commitment is different than convincing an executive to put some “teeth” behind their words. Once the CWM program is rolled out and the business units begin listing their thousand creative reasons (as they invariably do!) why the new rules shouldn’t apply to them, your executive support begins to wobble … and then takes an uncontrolled face-plant right into the tank! And who can blame the executive: the business units are the revenue producers for the company. If the executives can be convinced by their subordinates that your CWM Program will – in any way – slow down or curtail production (and thereby, the generation of revenue), no one in their right mind would support it.
Which leads us back to the most important element of CWM program design:
You must design and implement a CWM program that meets your clients’ needs 100% of the time.
--Elaine
Elaine Taylor is a subject matter expert in the area of contingent workforce management (CWM). She consults with Fortune 500 companies to help them develop CWM strategies that effectively reduce the cost of their temporary labor resources (by as much as 22%), while minimizing "employee misclassification" risk and introducing business process best practices. She has published broadly in the area of CWM, including co-authoring HR.com's Vendor Management System Buyer's Guide. Former and current clients include Charles Schwab & Co., Inc., Entergy Corporation, American Family Insurance, Ryder Transportation & Logistics, Northrop Grumman and Sutter Health.
Recent Comments