Flexible Staffing
This article covers meaning & overview of Flexible Staffing from HRM perspective.
What is Flexible Staffing?
Flexible Staffing is an arrangement in an organization where the employees can be from temporary agencies, leased employees or contract workers. The word Flexible Staffing has many connotations.
The following are a few of them:
• Temporary Agencies – workers that are provided by agencies to a particular company for a limited period of time on a momentary or perpetual basis. The company usually allocates the work to the employees. The momentary workers are generally employed for a short term which is less than one year which is the vital differentiator for them.
• Leased Employees – a company leases all/portion of its workforce on a fairly perpetual basis from an agency. The workers are normally instructed by the client, but are on the payroll of the agency.
• Contract Workers – these workers are employed by a company that contracts out their services to a client company. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), contract workers work for just one client at a time and that too at their worksite. However, their work is normally administered by the contract company, not the client.
The dissimilarity between agency temporary, leased employee, and contract company worker does not exist and is often fuzzy. In most polls, workers are asked to recognize themselves which are open to interpretations which muddies the results.
Some of the other types of flexible staffing situations include:
• Self-governing Contractors – Legally, these workers are self-employed, and they may or may not perform their services at the client’s worksite. The only data on the number of self-governing contractors comes from the Existing Populace Study. In this study, labors who specified that they worked as self-governing contractors, self-governing advisors, or self-employed workers were categorized as “self-governing contractors.”
• Direct Hire temporaries– These workers are employees of the companies where they work. They are employed for a partial period of time (usually for periodic work or for a distinctive job).
• On- call workers – These workers are also employees of the companies where they work; they are employed for an unlimited period, but they do not have frequently planned times. They are called in to work on an as desirable basis, often to fill in for an absent worker or to service with an augmented job. Standby instructors and numerous hospital staffs are on-call employees.
Advantages
1.Labor efficiency is high in a flexible staffing environment.
2.It also reduces the need to have employees work overtime to meet any deadlines.
3.The costs of maintaining the workforce are usually lower in a flexible staffing strategy.
4.The company saves time/cost associated with finding the right candidate withthe right skill set since all that is taken care of by the staffing agency
5.Along with lower cost of maintaining the workforce, there is no cost associated with termination of employees.
6.Low legal costs linked with employees
Hence, this concludes the definition of Flexible Staffing along with its overview.
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