“In a global business climate that’s perpetually ambiguous—and that puts a premium on companies’ ability to test ideas and change course on a dime—knowing how best to engage this lower-risk, flexible, and faster talent model can be a source of competitive advantage.”
This is a quote from a great article at Harvard Business Review entitled, The Rise of the Supertemp, by Jody Greenstone Miller and Matt Miller. I encourage you to read it – right after you finish reading this post.
This idea of “talent flexibility” as a competitive edge is one we often think about when discussing workforce planning, or talent supply and demand. Most, I think, struggle with the notion of moving employees in and out of roles as an ever-changing business strategy would dictate.
It takes time to train, relocate, and bring employees up to acceptable production levels in new jobs. Not to mention the effort and expense of trying to plan for workforce supply and demand contingencies that truly deliver a competitive advantage. We’re not talking about reactionary, back-filling of positions to meet the new “go-forward” thinking. We are talking about proactive workforce planning that anticipates talent demand, and reacts in real-time to meet the needs of the business.
One of the reasons I think workforce planning isn’t more of a business discipline – or should I say, hasn’t been embraced as a common practice, is that we continue to imagine the workforce as we know it today: full-time, long-term employees.
The article provides some interesting history on how the idea of contingent, or temporary workers has changed, and given the “temp” such a bad rap.
“The idea that long-term corporate jobs are the norm is deeply ingrained, but in reality these jobs arose in the past 60 or 70 years. Even in the manufacturing era that began in the late 19th century, employment was initially casual, with annual turnover around 300%. Big companies outsourced virtually everything. One analysis around 1910 found that half the workers in production jobs were independent contractors. But as assembly lines burgeoned and industrial machinery grew more complicated, employers saw the need for a stable trained workforce to control quality and maximize production, while the concentration of workers in cities and industrial hubs led to unions and advocacy for better pay, benefits, and rights.
During World War II, wage controls in the U.S. limited employers’ ability to woo workers with higher pay, so companies developed generous benefits and pension packages. The modern model of full-time, lifetime employment was born, and it offered great advantages to both workers and employers. Workers got security, benefits, and steady wage gains; companies got labor peace and the certainty of a return on hefty investments in firm-specific training.
But a scant few decades after corporate America had bulked up on cradle-to-grave employees, the pendulum began to swing the other way. Recessions in the 1970s and 1980s led to the downsizing of bloated corporate bureaucracies and helped brand temporary work as a sign of executive desperation.
Then came globalization. Technology and cheaper transportation made it easy to offshore production and even knowledge work to China or India, and the status of temp jobs as the last refuge of discarded managers was cemented.”
The article goes on to discuss other reasons for companies making such a dramatic shift from outsourcing to owning labor – and how so many of those companies grew into the large corporations we see today. Simply put, it is cheaper to keep resources and talent in-house than bear the high costs of transacting for labor on the open market.
Today, we translate that into: “It’s cheaper to retain employees than to hire new ones.”
However, the authors argue that new technologies and a developing spot market for high-end talent are driving transaction costs down and challenging assumptions about which management skills and professional talent belong inside versus outside the organization.
“When modular white-collar capabilities for which demand ebbs and flows—from strategy to innovation to product launches to contract negotiations to clinical trials—can become variable costs, and when those capabilities are sometimes as vital to a company’s success as specific knowledge of internal processes, the boundaries of organizational design may well shift.”
The authors go on to discuss organizations’ “internal readiness,” and the role that employee benefits plays in holding captive many talented professionals, who – in the words of the authors – “knew they could leave their permanent posts and get both a reliable flow of interesting, challenging, well-paid projects and group health coverage, traditional firms would see a mass exodus.”
Odds are, this movement will continue to gain popularity and group health coverage, and organizational readiness will allow organizations to tap into this market in the next few years.
I will leave you with this quote from the article:
“Companies may find that they need to create internal versions of project-based careers to retain their high performers. Many of them have experimented with flexible work arrangements, but mostly at the margins; the prevailing mind-set is still that high-end professionals must be permanent full-time employees.”
If you think we’re experiencing “buyers market” in employment today, you ain’t seen nothin’ yet. You must begin to prepare your organization with talent management strategy to take advantage of these emerging opportunities, not be limited by them.
If you are a regular reader of my blog, you know how strongly I feel about creating a talent management strategy. (And if you don’t: Read This, and Listen to This). It is an area we will continue to passionately encourage HR and business leaders to undertake, as talent management continues its high-speed transformation of the way we work.
Another infusion of knowledge…
The post Are You Hiring Supertemps? HR this is all about you, not procurement! appeared first on Knowledge Infuser.
