Issue link: https://www.e-digitaleditions.com/i/131821
Contingent Labor Relocation of Siemens AG, a global provider of electronics and electrical engineering systems to the energy, healthcare, and infrastructure, and other markets. What was the impetus for this journey? "From a visibility standpoint, we needed to know how many SOW workers we had, what they did, and what they were being paid," he says, "When we asked procurement, which is part of my group's responsibility in the U.S., the answer was, `We don't know—we need a tool.'" That got the ball rolling. governance around the way their hiring managers procure project-based labor," Creech says. "With this lack of governance comes a lack of visibility, and if you follow the logical thought-process through, you inevitably end up with a lack of control. Hence the move to true MSP programs." Another factor behind the development of SOW tools is the changing nature of the workforce. Although CEO Marissa Mayer recently banned telecommuting in an effort to have all the company's employees rubbing shoulders, most organizations are embracing truly novel concepts of labor, including retirees coming back to work on a short-term project. The Full Picture Driving Siemens and many other companies to obtain this visibility into SOW labor are several factors, among them the need to get a firmer grasp on total labor spend and the desire to simply have more human capital transparency throughout the organization. "For most companies, temporary labor or traditional staff augmentation has long been under some sort of managed program, typically a traditional master vendor program," says Teresa Creech, president of managed services provider and contingent workforce solutions at Randstad Sourceright. "We have regular fulltime employees working alongside part-time retirees, virtual employees working at home, and different types of contractors we use on a project-by-project basis," says Lisa Buckingham, chief human resources officer at Lincoln Financial, a provider of insurance and other financial services products. "The challenge for us and many other companies investing in such total workforce solutions is to develop ways to effectively manage these new forms of workers in this evolving dynamic." "But, management has been looking for the next pocket of value, and that is the SOW segment, which I break into two groups—the whole projectbased or deliverable-based work that requires transparency around worker management and contractual compliance, and then the subset of this work that directly relates to independent contractors, which creates additional worker classification challenges." "Companies are looking for systems and tools that can help them view their talent holistically, not just SOW labor or contingent labor but all labor," says Karen Browne, president of global staffing firm Advantage xPO. "Companies don't need just fulltime employees anymore. In a way, the Affordable Care Act encourages companies from a health benefit She is not alone in experiencing this difficulty. standpoint to consider labor that is more part-time and project-based (which relieves them of paying for these workers' health insurance). The problem with SOW labor is that companies "often have little or no This will drive a need for more professional contractors, which in turn APRIL 2013 | www.hrotoday.com [11]