Susan Tohyama is Chief Human Resources Officer of Ceridian, responsible for designing and driving the global people and culture strategy.
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A boundless workforce is one that is fluid, always on and borderless. It can pivot quickly, shrink or get bigger based on company needs, deliver the flexibility that today’s workers demand and help make organizations more agile to respond to changing market dynamics.
But to achieve all that is possible with a boundless workforce, companies must evolve. Long-standing people practices and habits must be updated to match our current environment.
Look to the pandemic as the major change agent. Earlier in my career, I had to fill out a form to request to work from home even one day a week. When the pandemic hit, most of us were working at home—overnight—and companies rapidly adapted to a changed work world. We’ve now learned that employees can be just as productive, if not more so, working from anywhere and that they want this flexibility. At the same time, more workers have embraced the gig economy.
To unlock the full potential of this boundless workforce, I'm seeing companies deploying certain workforce strategies, and the most successful companies are using them all.
1. Seamless Use Of Contingent Workers
Businesses have increased their use of contingent workers in recent years, with some large enterprises reporting up to 30% of procurement spend on contingent workers, according to a Deloitte report. This dovetails with my own company's research, which shows that increased use of contingent workers is likely in the next two years.
A contingent workforce delivers the flexibility workers want while helping companies become more agile. They can tap skills, for instance, that they only need for a short time and can expand and shrink the workforce based on operational needs.
But it requires thoughtful onboarding to make contingent workforces productive and integrated with the rest of the company. Contingent workers, like all employees, need clear expectations. The best managers will constantly check in with contingent workers and listen to what’s said in exit interviews to improve processes. The boundless workforce goes hand in hand with the growth of contingent workforces, which can benefit both workers and companies.
2. Skills-Based Hiring
In general, this means hiring someone based on skills versus the more traditional way of hiring based on degrees and previous experience. This can open the labor pool globally because companies may find they no longer need people from certain colleges or people with particular degrees to excel at certain jobs. Skills-based hiring requires companies to think a few years ahead because skills take time to find and build. But if companies can hire for skills and then build on those skills, the internal pipeline of talent also fills.
Finding the right people with the right skills gets easier with advancing technologies that enable rapid searches of vast databases of information. But softer skills, such as ambition, ability to lead or empathy, will almost always require a human touch to find and test them. Any good interviewer at a company should be able to tease out soft skill strengths in actual interviews using tried and true techniques such as role-based interviewing.
3. More Use Of AI
Right now, AI is often used to relieve workers of repetitive tasks. That frees workers up for other projects and tasks. With each advancing year, AI will enhance a worker’s ability to do more and to do so more rapidly.
For organizations, the key to AI is ensuring people remain at the core of AI strategies. It’s about using AI to support and strengthen employee performance. It’s about embedding value for both generative and non-generative AI across an organization’s people operations. The power of AI has the potential to flow to workers everywhere—and that means more opportunities for companies to tap and enhance talent around the world.
4. Enhanced Use Of Internal Mobility
Many companies face labor and skills shortages, and the competition for talent means that someone will always lose when trying to attract new, outside talent.
But many companies overlook the potential of internal mobility. Internal lateral hires account for just 10% of positions filled, according to research in MIT Sloan Management Review.
Here, old habits play a role. For a long time, people moved up and around an organization because someone knew they were good at something. But that’s a scenario that’s largely left to chance, and people were often overlooked for opportunities that went to outside talent. Similarly, managers have been reluctant to let stellar employees go and work elsewhere in the company. And poaching is discouraged, so many employees end up leaving to apply skills in new ways or to learn new ones altogether.
Today, internal mobility no longer means just getting more employees to climb the ladder. Lateral movements enable desired skill development and career path challenges that are meaningful not only to the company but to the individual as well.
Also, technology is making it easier to find new skills within a workforce. Online employee profiles can more easily be updated to add notification of completed training sessions or the acquisition of new skills. Managers can more easily search for and find internal candidates. The increased use of technology will make internal mobility more equitable and reliable as a source of talent. It will also help ensure that information about the skills of workers outside of the office, including in other countries, is as accessible to hiring managers as information about more local workers.
Different Ways For Different Companies
While many companies are asking employees back to the office at least a few days a week, I believe most companies will not fully return to the workforce structures they had pre-pandemic. Every company needs to assess their own needs and act accordingly.
For most companies, however, embracing a boundless workforce using strategies like those I've described above will enable them to navigate a challenging labor market by tapping more talent throughout the world and increasing productivity with new ways of working.
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