3 Ways to Create Cost Savings for Your Contingent & Full-Time Workforce Programs

The COVID-19 pandemic has taught us a lot about business. We’ve learned how important communication is between employers and employees. We’ve seen the prevalence of mental illness in society. We’ve also learned that businesses need to prepare for the unexpected. They need to be able to sustain themselves when revenue dips. A great way to do that is by creating cost-savings. One way you can do that is by taking a look at your contingent and full-time workforce programs and finding ways to save. Here are three ways you can create cost savings for your contingent and full-time workforce programs:

The Difference Between a Contingent and Full-Time Program

Before tackling cost-saving strategies for your contingent and full-time workforce programs, let’s start at the beginning. What’s the difference between a contingent workforce and a full-time workforce?

Full-Time Workforce

Someone is on a full-time workforce if they work more than 30 hours per week or more than 130 hours per month. Full-time employment generally comes with benefits that aren’t typically offered to contingent workers, including sick leave and health insurance.

Contingent Workforce

A contingent workforce consists of people who aren’t considered employees. Rather, they work under a contract or temporarily. More times than not, contingent workers do not get benefits.

Start with a Solid Compensation Strategy

It starts here. It would be best if you built your contingent and full-time workforce programs on a solid compensation strategy. Most importantly, you have to align it with your business’ values, culture, and goals.

Are you trying to increase your market share and need to expand? Are you pivoting and need to go lean? Whatever’s on the radar, the compensation strategy for both your contingent and full-time workforce programs needs to stay in line. As your goals evolve, your compensation strategies should do the same.

Building a Compensation Strategy

So, how can you build a solid compensation strategy? Start here:

Never rely on a single source of truth. It’s in your best interest to “shop around” for the market data and intelligence from which you’ll build your compensation strategies. Don’t rely on one. You want a market-based pay structure that reflects the entirety of your industry and competitors.
Be as accurate as possible. Take your time creating the most accurate compensation packages you can for each employee—after all, each employee is different, so shouldn’t their compensation package be as well? Ask yourself: How long have they been in the industry? What will they be responsible for at our company? Where are they based?
Tie everything back to the business. Finally, look at how your overall compensation strategy is playing with the business. How is it impacting the company? Is it exceeding expectations? Has growth stalled? More often than not, overall company health will be the key indicator of your contingent and full-time workforce programs’ health.

By going step-by-step through creating your compensation strategy and answering these questions—as basic as they may seem—you’ll put the company in a prime position for long-term success and sustainability.

Optimize Your Job Catalog

Another way to create cost savings from your workforce programs is to optimize your job catalog, i.e., a list of jobs available at your company. Optimizing your catalog means aligning job classifications with market rates, which is essential to building an approved compensation structure.

Start with a job-catalog assessment. When doing this, aim to standardize job titles, levels, and descriptions across your contingent and full-time workforce programs. It would be best if you also looked to align job classifications and skills with up-to-date market rates. Not only will this help avoid overpaying or underpaying employees who have similar skillsets, but optimizing your job catalog can create significant cost savings.

In-line CTA: Job-catalog optimization can get tricky for larger organizations. We can help simplify it. Want to learn more? Contact us today.

Team Up with AI-Powered Technology

Human Resource and Procurement teams are all about people—and they should be. That said, you shouldn’t shy away from technology to help you work more effectively and efficiently. Doing so will only prevent you from the most actionable and accurate rate recommendations, and most importantly, more cost savings.

Today, there’s technology that can help you craft and optimize your contingent and full-time workplace programs in a way that creates cost savings. For example, ARCH AI, our proprietary AI-powered platform, analyzes the labor market to provide you with accurate and actionable compensation analytics to ensure you’re getting market rates that are tailored to your company’s unique needs. What’s not to love?

It’s Just Good for Business

As we enter the new age of business, forward-thinking companies will seek ways to optimize their business. One way they can do that is by turning toward their contingent and full-time workforce programs and seeing if there’s an opportunity to save.

Hint: there is.

By starting with a solid compensation strategy and optimizing your job catalog to tapping into AI-powered technology, your workforce programs don’t have to be your biggest expense. When done right, they should set you up for success—and save you money along the way.