Hey there, People leaders! Today, we’re focusing on how AI can help you manage your flexible workforce, specifically. With a growing appetite for ‘total talent’ solutions in the world of talent acquisition, it’s certainly worth starting to consider about how you wrap your permanent and flexible workforces into one neatly managed ecosystem (using AI to help of course!)
Whether you have freelancers, contractors or fractional staff, AI is here to be your trusty sidekick in this dynamic work landscape and can help you build and manage your ecosystem. Here’s how:
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Sourcing
AI-powered platforms can quickly identify and connect you with best-fit freelancers, contractors, or fractional staff based on specific skill gaps or business objectives. AI’s matching capabilities can help you can streamline the process of finding and onboarding talented individuals who can come in on a flexible basis and make a huge impact.
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Onboarding & Offboarding
AI can simplify the onboarding and offboarding process for members of your flexible workforce. For example, automated workflows ensure new workers receive the necessary documentation (company FAQs, invoicing information), access to systems (Slack channels, Notion pages, Trello boards etc.) and training materials, while departing members go through a smooth transition too. This saves you time with man-managed tasks at either end of a worker’s assignment and ensures consistency across the board in terms of communication and overall experience.
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Resource Allocation
AI tools can analyse your team’s workloads, skill sets and project requirements to help you make informed decisions about resource allocation based on what’s not working, falling behind or is costing you too much money, for example. By leveraging AI insights, you can assign the right people to the right projects as you scale and ensure your permanent teams are augmented with flexible resource in the right place, at the right time.
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Project Management
AI-based project management tools can help you track progress, monitor deadlines, and allocate tasks to your flexible workforce. Look for tools or platforms with real-time updates, collaborative features, and AI-driven analytics, so you can stay on top of projects and ensure smooth coordination among team members, regardless of their employment type. It’s worth noting, however, that there is already a wealth of great project management tools available to you out there – it may just be a case of automating certain processes or API’ing between platforms if you are managing people/tasks separately for your permanent and flexible workforces.
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Performance Monitoring
AI algorithms can provide real-time insights into the performance of your flexible workforce as they work on your projects. By analysing vast swathes of data, tracking key metrics vs. project objectives and generating feedback in neat summaries for you, AI tools can help you provide timely and constructive evaluations on how effective your resources are operating and open up opportunities to foster growth and improvement among your team members.
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Analytics and Reporting
AI can consolidate data from various sources into one centralised source (e.g. a dashboard, spread sheet or database), allowing you to gain a holistic view of your entire workforce and everything they’re working on. By leveraging AI-driven analytics and reporting tools, you can more accurately measure the effectiveness and ROI of your flexible workforce, view them in comparison to, and alongside, your permanent workforce and thus make data-driven decisions on how your teams are best structured, sized and deployed.
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Summary
AI tools are often spoken about as as tools to be adopted and honed by your permanent teams, as vessels to greater speed and efficiency with their everyday tasks. However, it is perhaps more often than not overlooked that the capabilities of the very same tools allow you to manage your flexible workforce in just the same way. AI empowers you to optimise resource allocation, streamline communication, and ensure efficient project management and is not limited to shortcutting manual processes or removing admin tasks for your bigger, more established teams.
Embrace AI as a way to unlock the potential of your flexible workforce, in terms of how it is grown, managed and optimised for efficiency. With all things AI, of course, its usage and value to your business is entirely dependent on a number of variables; your size, your market, what you sell and where you’re going. Every use of AI should be mapped against a specific task, problem or inefficiency in your business and not bolted on to your tech stack as ‘innovation for innovation’s sake’. With targeted and very deliberate usage of AI, you can gain a whole new view of how you muster and manage your entire talent ecosystem.
Happy hiring!
Author
Brad Coombes
Leadership
