Talent Tip #18: Integrated Workforce Management Streamlines Staffing, Saves Money

Brought to you by SourceRight Solutions

Has talent acquisition and management in your company become so fragmented that it’s hard to keep track? Does a unified strategy seem completely out of reach? With many workplaces now staffed with a mix of permanent, temporary, contingent and contract workers, a lack of coordination and transparency may seem inevitable.

But there is an alternative. A growing number of companies are turning to Integrated Workforce Management, and a number of providers are stepping in to provide these services.

While Integrated Workforce Management strategies vary depending on the provider and client needs, they usually incorporate some combination of Recruitment Process Outsourcing, Managed Services and VMS. A smaller number of providers offer Workforce Compliance programs to ensure that the employer meets its legal and insurance obligations, among others.

The trend toward Integrated Workforce Management is driven by a realization that a decentralized approach has substantial limitations. By failing to unify hiring efforts, companies are missing important opportunities to save money, gain leverage and flexibility, increase productivity and gain a competitive talent advantage.

Because Integrated Workforce Management is a fundamental shift for many organizations, it often has to be initiated and driven at the senior levels. While it is likely to become a preferred staffing model over time, every company may not be an immediate candidate.

To assess whether a company would benefit from Integrated Workforce Management, decision-makers can consider these key issues:

• What are the core benefits and competitive "talent" advantage that can be captured through the implementation of Integrated Workforce Management?


• What are the fundamental organizational changes required to implement an Integrated Workforce Management methodology and best practices?


• What are the potential savings and risk-mitigation benefits that can be achieved?

As the workplace becomes more complicated, Integrated Workforce Management is emerging as an important strategy to achieve better results at a lower cost with fewer administrative complications. Right now, forward-thinking providers and their clients are driving the trend.

Leadership Tip #11: InnovationStationSM Experience

Brought to you by Raytheon Professional Services
By Bernie Saboe, Raytheon Professional Services

Economic spirals, wide spread cost cuts and increased pressures for operational performance, often drain organizations of their full creative potential. The intense cadence for business results and growth is insatiable. It is during these uncertain times that leave the workforce wondering, “how can we, I, survive?” During these harsh business conditions is precisely the time when we need innovation most.

No matter where in the world you are working, daily schedules fill up with emerging issues that need to be solved. This leaves little room in the day for creativity and innovation. How often do you carve out dedicated time to apply innovative thinking on personal or professional problems? Where does the inspiration for innovative ideas come from? How can I turn an individual creative thought into a wildly successful innovation? InnovationStation Experience has demonstrated techniques that arms today’s workforce with the toolset for innovation.

InnovationStation Tips:

1. Be There: Make space in your busy day and dedicate it towards creative thinking on a specific topic. Separate yourself from the distractions and clear your mind of the noise. With your mind’s eye, examine the subject from multiple angles and perspectives.


2. Set the Stage: Explore your imagination and practice collaborative idea generation. Most great innovations stem from sharing the creative ideas with others. It is then that infant concepts gain dimension and mature into brilliance. Put the idea into a context and framework for others to understand; set the stage.


3. Tell the Story: Innovative ideas are countless; many die an early, sometimes premature death. Turning an idea into reality requires that others can connect to the concept. You need to create a powerful, positive intellectual and emotional connection to idea. Presenting your innovative idea in the form of a story can be the source of inspiration for others to further the idea into reality.

The beauty of this approach is its simplicity and flexibility, both essential for success. Our problems are complex enough, we do not need to further complicate our work environment and confuse our people. Already the InnovationStation Experience has changed the outcome of business strategy, global learning, program execution, product designs, adjacent market growth, training administration, user interface design and personal career development.

At Raytheon, hundreds of employees have applied InnovationStation Experience as part of the personal career development. These people are creating non-traditional ways to innovate their careers that enable business success.

Talent Tip # 17: The Social Networking Shift in Recruiting

Brought to you by SourceRight Solutions

In a highly competitive and constantly changing labor market, recruiters need to redefine the hiring process and help streamline the HR function. As labor markets evolve, successful hiring companies will make use of social networking to help innovate their talent management strategies.

Social media such as Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter are providing highly effective avenues to encourage global conversations in the recruiting space. There are several ways hiring companies can make use of these social networking platforms:

1. Elevate their brand awareness. Social media sites enable organizations to promote their brand to a broad range of prospective employees, locally, regionally and globally.


2. Promote transparency. Social media sites allow hiring organizations to share news feeds and critical company updates with a global audience.


3. Interact with prospective candidates. Social media networks are especially useful for passive candidate recruiting, which will be a primary focus for companies as the economy starts to rebound and they need to scale up quickly.


4. Identify candidates. Organizations across all sectors will be faced with a declining labor pool – according to the Department of Labor Statistics, 24 million people will exit the U.S. labor pool by 2010. Recruiting teams will need to incorporate social networking into their sourcing strategy, particularly for “hard-to-fill” and “high-priority” positions.
   

Recruitment process outsourcing (RPO) – one of the most dynamic and rapidly growing practices in HR today – can boost hiring companies’ leverage of social media in these volatile hiring times. Working with an RPO provider can bring a unique ability to utilize these tools; the provider’s placement across market segments and a wide variety of organizations enable them to gain insight and expose key trends in the market not always available in-house. RPO providers are leading the conversation on post-recessionary hiring and how companies can successfully deal with the challenges that this new hiring landscape will present.

Bottom Line Tip #11: Using Manufacturing Theory to Streamline the Financial Close

Brought to you by HP

One of the most challenging core functions in finance today is the financial close. Every company, public or private, large or small - develops, manufactures, and delivers a set of products and services. Finance delivers financial statements as a product to its many stakeholders who have a right to expect that the company uses the same level of diligence in producing these statements as they do in delivering the other products and services that they sell. Consider the actions of managers at the manufacturing level. In their quest to ascend from zero to Six Sigma, they have been able to reduce costs, improve cycle times, increase customer satisfaction, and produce higher quality products. Finance should be no different and must require the same amount of quality rigor and focus to achieve similar process improvements. It is possible for financial statements to come off a production line with the same level of precision and quality as semiconductors, cars, or bank statements.

To optimize the monthly close cycle, finance must align the organizational perspective around the clearly definable phases of a successful close production:

• Transactional Processing

• Controllership Validation

• Reporting

• Maintenance

Finance must invest properly in the full utilization of the entire 30 day cycle with integrated leadership of these phases. When working within the phase concept, it becomes easier to focus on specific inputs, outputs, and deliverables. The ability to extend resources into partnered BPO functions or retained shared service centers becomes more pragmatic within defined best practices of role sharing.

Using manufacturing theory on close production will shift a great deal of new focus to the maintenance phase of the close cycle. Now corrective actions, process improvement, and non-time critical tasks get scheduled and managed. Planning for the next cycle becomes a paramount activity. Structure is placed around the management of the overall close cycle.

With an integrated close that tightly links financial numbers with the relevant controls, reconciliations, and close tasks, finance can build predictability, flexibility and sustainability into their financial close. Ultimately, the end game will result in increased productivity, reduced cycle times, lower personnel cost; lower external fees, fewer material weaknesses and financial restatements.

Talent Tip #16: Contingent Workforce Is a Powerful Tool in Recessionary Times

Brought to you by SourceRight Solutions

Cutting your workforce to save money may be necessary, but it’s likely to have a big impact on your employees and customers. One way to mitigate the negative effect is to hire contingent workers to fill important roles. With unemployment high, the talent pool is deep and varied. Contingent hiring can provide benefits now and in the future, including:

1. Lower costs: Unlike direct-hires, temporary or contract employees work for the staffing agency. That reduces administrative costs, as well as benefit costs that are typically built into a salary.


2. Scalability: Hire only who you need when you need them. When the project ends, so do the costs. Moreover, you can zero in on the most critical skills without having to consider the long-term demand for those skills.


3. Flexibility across skill levels: From lower-skilled volume positions to high-level executive roles, you can handpick the experience level you need. One current trend involves bringing in high-level professionals to plan and execute major changes, from reorganizing departments to reviewing the compensation system. When the project is done, the interim can make a clean break. This helps to maintain harmonious relationships among permanent staff.


4. Screen potential hires: Get a leg up on hiring when business picks up. You’ll know if your contingent workers have the skills and work ethic you seek in permanent hires. You will also have saved the recruiting and training costs--which can be substantial.
   

In tenuous times, contingent hiring can keep your business competitive by filling key positions and reducing the pressure on your full-time employees so they can stay focused and productive.