Issue link: https://www.e-digitaleditions.com/i/73199
MSP According to the Corporate Social Responsibility Branding Survey by Penn Schoen Berland in 2010, 33 per cent of employees would take a pay cut to work at a more socially responsible firm. Employees today are more likely to pick an organisation with the better record on socially responsible lists such as Corporate Responsibility Magazine's "100 Best Corporate Citizen List" or the Dow Jones Sustainability Index. The Free-Agent Economy Ultimately, the talent plan for any company must consider these things, but most experts agree there is a need for better talent planning and workforce planning. Worker loyalty and average tenure might continue to decline, and that is a factor to be considered in training, planning and the decision of how many employees will be FTE versus PTE. According to a recent 2012 Metlife Study of Employee Benefits Trends, "Employee loyalty continues to wane. The percentage of employees who feel a very strong sense of loyalty towards their employer is at only 42 per cent—a seven-year low. One in three people would like to work for a different employer in 2012, but that number climbs to one in two for Gen Y employees." If the U.S. moves to more of a free-agent economy, there might be an increasing number of positions that are being managed as contingent resources or on SOW contracts. If so, the MSPs that have long been considered a financial arrangement by HR might hold some strategic value that needs to be examined as a way to address the competitive workforce challenges ahead. Contingent resources have a markup cost associated with them and accordingly are carefully managed for expense control purposes. MSPs use sophisticated vendor management systems (VMS) for headcount and resource accounting. Budgeting, resource allocation, and workforce planning are carefully monitored, and this discipline, while not ideal on the contingent labour side either, needs to be better systematised on the full- time employment side. If all full-time labour were managed with the same rigor and expense discipline as an MSP, then workforce planning sophistication throughout the enterprise might improve. Much of the blame in the workforce planning does not lie at the feet of HR; it lies in the operating units and their inability to predict. Arguably, the baseline skill of any executive should be the ability "to predict." However, it falls on HR to provide the tools, framework, and cultural change management to facilitate this process. There are process and change management structures used in MSP that have driven the ability to get all operating units to report, budget, and use only approved providers. In addition, the concept of productivity and performance management needs to change. What is the difference between hiring an IT resource through a contingent labour provider for a one-year contract and a direct full-time employee? You might plan for more than a year on a full- time hire, but in some geographical areas that might be all you get. Yet, the full-time employee has knowledge transfer plans, orientations, performance management, and goal alignment strategies, and a host of productivity measures and motivational processes to get maximum output during their tenure. The part-time employee receives none of this but might be at the company for an equal duration. Through the contingent provider, some of the motivational approaches to improve productivity should be explored. If 35 per cent of a workforce is contingent labour and leaders have left the MSP administration or contract design to procurement, then HR is not engaged on programming for more than a third of the employee population. However, in many companies, HR is not contract owner or even a partner of the MSP program. There are clearly opportunities to take lessons from contingent labour into the permanent labour side and vice versa. The competitive workforce issues are complex, and companies have to have a four-fold strategy. They have to find experienced workers, they have to train and dvelop workers, they have to retain and engage them, and they must have the kind of company narrative (for example, corporate responsibility or other profile) that is important to the workforce. And, when that is done, they have to be able to measure and report it. Recruiting is now a global challenge in both permanent and contingent categories for both highly skilled and skilled workers. Training is a long-term investment. And vital elements must be put in place on top of that: discipline, very strong workforce planning, and a great software platform with the kind of functionality that can be found in some VMS systems or talent management systems or workforce planning software packages. Building a great workforce is not easy, and no one is forecasting it will get easier anytime soon. SPRING 2012 | www.hroglobal.com [27]