Christina Brun Petersen co-founded Worksome in 2016. Today she leads the flexible revolution as Worksome’s Chief People Officer.
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It’s no secret that more and more workers are choosing to go freelance. Smart companies are already growing their external workforces to keep up with this trend. But hiring a contractor isn’t the same as hiring a full-time employee. Attracting them, onboarding them and providing them with a great experience all can look very different than what is done for full-time employees.
There are many different things to consider here, but let’s take a look at three of the biggest ones. Understanding these factors can help alleviate some of the challenges so that you can see even better results from your external workforce.
What kind of experience are you giving your workers?
You put a lot of thought into what kind of experience you give to your full-time employees, but most companies don’t put the same amount of thought into creating a great experience for their external workers. All you need to do is understand what matters to freelancers and build them an experience that takes those things into account.
Things like flexibility, on-time payments and easy onboarding can improve the freelancer experience, and focusing on these things could have a huge impact on making sure your contractors have a good experience working with you.
There’s a big flip side to this as well. If you aren’t putting good processes and systems in place to manage your external workers, your internal teams that work with them could be negatively impacted. HR, finance, operations and legal teams all handle different aspects of contractor management. If they can't effectively manage and communicate their portions together, they’re likely working in silos.
Visibility is crucial.
At an individual level, it might seem easy for your hiring managers to keep track of their contractors. But this could leave your company with a blind spot. Without overall visibility into your external workforce, it can be difficult to understand and evaluate your external workforce as a whole. Without this perspective, making optimizations or improvements to your external workforce can be challenging.
Managing your external workforce—where your finance, HR, operations and legal departments all have access to the same information—can help alleviate the pain points of siloes and breakdowns in communication.
Eliminate the back-and-forth your internal teams have to do to ensure everyone is aligned. Have a dedicated place to keep track of freelancers; this allows you means to build a network of vetted talent that everyone in the company can access. This makes your talent more accessible and minimizes the need to constantly source new talent.
Minimize risks around compliance.
For companies that manage a lot of contractors, compliance and worker classification are on everyone’s mind. In the event that workers are misclassified or you end up without the correct documentation in the event of an audit, you’re opening up your company to the potential for risk. The classification process can also add a lot of time to onboarding, slowing down your contractors from getting started when your hiring managers really need them to get started on their work.
The last concern with classification is time wasted for your internal teams and higher operational costs if you’re outsourcing this step to a third party. Your internal teams spend significant amounts of time communicating all of the relevant information your third party needs to do the classification, verifying it was done correctly, and documenting everything.
Breakdowns in communication can lead to incorrect information. Minimizing the number of tools and vendors here makes your process more efficient and can help reduce risk when it comes to your external workforce.
Security breaches are also a big compliance concern. What security processes do you have in place for your external workers? It’s important to have the right paperwork in place to ensure they’re legally required to protect your confidential information and that you’re offboarding them properly to ensure they lose access to your information—and, in some cases, physical locations—once their contract is completed.
Some contractors are terminated before the end date of their contract as well. Many companies forget to put a process in place that terminates their access in this event, leaving them with access to your sensitive information for weeks or potentially even months.
Empower your workers—both internal and external—for success.
What kind of experience do your workers have with you? What level of visibility do you have into your external workforce? Are you confident in compliance when it comes to your external workforce?
These are the questions that every company with an external workforce needs to be asking itself. If you’re not building a great experience for all of your workers, you won’t be competitive for the talent you need. It could hurt your business in the long run.
If you don’t have visibility into your external workforce, your business could become increasingly inefficient as more and more workers go freelance. Compliance concerns will only grow if they aren’t handled now as well.
