Blog

[Video] - Frustrations and Realities of Incorporating SOW Workers


Statement of Work (SOW) management is considered the next frontier for contingent workforce (CW) programs. Third-party consulting firms or professional services can be a large source of external workers for a business, but many companies have not integrated them into their traditional CW program management yet.

While the benefits are bringing greater visibility, more control, and overall efficiency over the extended workforce, there are struggles with implementation. Problems vary from the business viewing every SOW as unique, technology obstacles, and program designs with conflicting objectives.

To better understand the challenges, we invited special guest, Steven Kekich, to discuss some of the ins-and-outs of SOW management based on his previous experience at organizations such as Amazon, Uber, eBay, and PayPal. Below are the key insights from the conversation.

Key Insights

  1. Incorporating SOW workers gives you more visibility over your workforce spend and simplifies the process for end-users. If you don’t have visibility into the spend on large SOWs, then you can’t make informed decisions. You simply won’t know what the spend is or if it needs to be re-negotiated. The other benefit is that creating a single process for the hiring manager, whether it be contract templates or a single communication channel, simplifies everything.

  2. Don’t over-engineer the process or put obstacles on the path to incorporation. Steven recommends not asking too many questions. You need to get to a better point than where you are currently. Spending two years on discovery and asking too many questions will only delay any process improvements. It’s better to gradually build the program up.

  3. To sell the value to suppliers, emphasize contract efficiency and that it may open more opportunities long-term. SOW providers will have an easier time getting contracts through the door with one single process. Over the long-term, the business will have better visibility over the entire supplier base and can assess where there are opportunities for more spend with a supplier. Without any data, the contingent workforce team can’t assess which suppliers are performing well or not.

  4. 100% control of spend is not always the goal. Some suppliers will fight and avoid being part of your centralized program and sometimes it’s okay to accept that. Provide the decision-makers with the data and ask them twice to join the program, but it may not be worth the hassle if they refuse. Focus on getting critical mass when controlling your spend; it’s a big deal to go from 20% of spend to 80% of spend under control. The value for the remainder may not be worth it.

  5. For some organizations, getting control of spend and savings is not a top priority. It may not always resonate with the C-Suite about the benefits of spend control. At the very least, it is better to start with a business unit or subsidiary and prove the benefits of spend control first rather than taking the process globally. Or speak with a VP of a department to get your initiative going and suggest a single department for your SOW control initiatives.

Watch the recording

HubSpot Video

 

Read the full transcript

Saad Asad:

Perfect. And what a way to open and now I have to segue that somehow into frustrations and realities with SOW. All right, let's get started. Hi everyone. I'm Saad on the marketing team here at Utmost.

Purpose of these webinars, Q and A's, is just to be an educational series for you to chat and learn about parts of the contingent workforce and to bring on special guests. In this case, Steven, this week.

Erika Novak:

Awesome. So, hi everyone. I'm Erica Novak. I'm head of client services here at Utmost, been doing contingent workforce over the past 15 years. Have built programs internally at eBay and LinkedIn and then did some consulting with Brightfield Strategies before joining Utmost and attempting to build a new technology.

So this is my lifeblood. I love talking about this and I love talking with other people. So excited to be here. And Steven won't you share a little about yourself.

Steven Kekich:

Great. Thank you all. First off, thanks everybody for joining. Really appreciate it. My name is Steven Kekich. I've been in the contingent workforce area probably for about the last seven or eight years since I've moved out to the Bay area with some big tech clients and other people like that.

But the great thing about this area is I've been in both the HR side and the procurement side. And so I feel I've got a little unique understanding about some of the forces that pull each of us in different directions. So hoping I can share some of those thoughts today.

Erika Novak:

Excellent. And that's one of the reasons why I love having you on is that I don't think a lot of people have both. Usually, they start in procurement or they're in HR. So you have a nice blend of both.

So we'd love to get your perspective on what you see. You own programs in both of them. So what's different? How does procurement focus their program versus HR? And have you been able to blend your two perspectives into some of your more current programs?

Steven Kekich:

Absolutely. So, typically procurement organizations are in finance. And one thing that procurement organizations are responsible for is savings. And I've been part of many organizations where that's 80% or 90% of what you're graded on. It's not about the deal. It's not about risk. It's not about even value, it's just about get me that savings number every year.

And those for me aren't places where I want to stay for a long time. And so if I ever found myself in one of those places, I found a better opportunity. But, that's not what procurement is all about everywhere.

And so I think I struggle with trying to empower people within those organizations, how can you make known the soft benefits and the value that you're providing. Because, it's really not all about that savings. It's about what is the product that I'm getting out of it.

And I'm not going to say it right on the air here, but if anybody's seen Tommy Boy when he's selling that box of auto parts, you know what I'm talking about. You can put a nice label on anything, but at the end of the day, it still is a pile of something else.

So as you move over to HR, a lot of it is about user experience, it's about processes and procedures. And people who know me, I'm the last person who I ever thought would have been in HR.

I'm blunt, I'm straightforward, I'm to the point, I don't care about other's feelings. Multiple girlfriends have broken up with me because I don't express myself. But having to deal with those types of things, it's been a very good professional growth for me.

And I think you find the value in that, hey, we need to provide somebody with a great experience but we can't do it at a cost of all of these other things. Whether it's time, whether it's resources and stuff like that.

So I think as you look at the HR organization, it's things that are completely different than the procurement organization. And companies that do it right, I think they have a good blend between the two.

Erika Novak:

That makes it a lot of sense. So moving to value, because I agree with you. Sometimes at $300 an hour, a person is the right person. Even if it's not within a per se a bill rate range that's approved or so. When you think about the value versus the cost, quality, speed, what are you going to focus on or so.

So talk to me a little bit. Because, one of the topics that we wanted to really focus on today is the idea of the statement of work modules at a VMS. Because, I think there's been a lot of missed expectations. It's on the maturity model that SIA talks about. This is the next level. And there's been some disagreement on that. Is that actually the next level of maturity? Can you still mature in a different way?

And so what I think people who are joining this want to hear about, what are some of the realities of it? So to start off, let's talk about the value. So if you are from the procurement or HR organization, what would be the value of looking to add on the statement of work module to your contractor module? And actually let me stop there. Just to make sure we're defining our terms and whether everyone is on the same page.

We're going to talk about the contractor module with staff augmentation. The temporary workers or contractors, what the VMS were built upon. Time and materials. I'm searching for one person, maybe 10 that's role-based. I think about statement of work. I'm going to think about more about the professional services and outsource product. So not even that independent contractor use case. Let's talk about the larger SOW's coming through this module. That sounds fair to you, those two different definitions?

Steven Kekich:

Yeah. I think that sounds fair. And as I've talked to different companies in the Bay area and just globally it seems usually there's a segmentation of three or four different types of workers. And so you've got that temp, you've got what we call deliverable based SOW PVCs. There's all kinds of things that people call them. And then there's that larger outsourced bucket. Where a great example would be call centers or customer service or just large pieces of business that you're outsourcing.

And then of course we've got IC's, who are completely different story. But I think the number one value for bringing things into a program is data in the centralization of processes. The reality, is any time that I've implemented this or talked to other people about it, a lot of the data surrounding the SOW module is unknown.

It's unknown as to what type of... I know that I'm spending a 100 million dollars on consulting, but is it big data? Is it legal? Is it this? What are those segments that I'm spending on?

And the reason why this is all important is because if you don't have data, you can't make informed decisions. And ultimately I think there's several steps and as you go up the pyramid, first you need that base, that foundation, so that you can do more of the value add activities. And what a lot of organizations don't have around consulting labor is that data to really replicate on.

I can tell you, vendor X does $8 million of business, but I might not even know what type of business it is and if it's replicable. Is that $8 million worth of spend something that I as a procurement person should actually spend my time on investigating and providing more value for and negotiating? Or is it so disparate. Or just it is what it is. That there's other places where I can spend my time and energy.

I also think from a process perspective, if you think about your end users, they are going through maybe different legal processes or contract channels or things like this. And if you can do some simple things where a centralized organization is able to approve a contract or a template or just make things more efficient, you can remove time and energy that they're spending on those things. And ultimately it's better for everybody in the long-term.

Erika Novak:

Okay. And so that's the value proposition I'm hearing. I'm hearing data and process centralization or standardization.

Steven Kekich:

Absolutely.

Erika Novak:

Talk to me about the discovery. So everyone's on board, your VMS is already in place. So we say, yes, we're moving forward. But what are the discovery activities like? What are they asking? Who are they including and what are you trying to determine as you start to build out this functionality?

Steven Kekich:

It's a great question and I think you can go two ways. One is, don't really ask too many questions. This is going to be counterintuitive to a lot of people. Let's not make a bunch of decisions on what we don't know. The point of moving towards this is to say what is a basic process and what are the standards that we think we want and let's implement them.

And especially if you think of Agile or you think of these tech companies, it's more about building and building. And I'm one of those types of people that, hey, if we can do it better than yesterday, then let's make that step. Now that's not always the most efficient thing to do, but it's saying, hey, let's take a step up, let's reset and then let's get where we can determine what that next step is.

And I think a lot of people over complicate things more than they need to. A lot of people on this call probably have day jobs. They're doing a lot of other things. You can't spend two years figuring out what this is. You can, I choose not to.

So I'd rather do smaller steps more quickly and have an edited approach. I realize that's not the case for everybody. I think the other thing that I would tell you is, it's always worked best for me when you have a champion. When you have somebody within the business or one organization that has a meaningful stake with what you make.

Erika Novak:

And let me pause you on that, because if you think about it, procurement's the business. So if you're in procurement, do you mean a business like a high volume contracts person? Not in procurement who's implementing this, but who may be on the product team, who is hiring a lot of people. So it's outside or even though you are buying this for yourself?

Steven Kekich:

I would tell you this, procurement is an expense. And at the end of the day, we don't have the power regardless of what anybody will tell you, someone that drives revenue and adds to the bottom line.

And so if you had one of those people at a VP level, at a position of power or even of influence. It's not necessarily about title, but they command a lot of spend or they have firm relationships working with them to get to this point, is necessary. It's almost required. Procurement goes and tries to do this himself without that support. It's just not going to work.

Erika Novak:

Okay. That's helpful. Talk to me about change management. Because I hear what you're saying, hey, don't over orchestrate. Don't over-engineer, centralize and figure it out as you go.

But there's a big part of change management because not everyone will agree with that idea.

So if you're going to say we're going this way or iterate. What are you sharing with the business, your procurement teams around change, here's what we're going to go forward with and here's what the implementation timeline is.

Because I think that's where there's a lot of hiccups. There's an idea of it's going to be this way and either change management doesn't occur in the way it does or we're missing something on set expectations. So talk to me a little about what that plan looks like.

Saad Asad:

And to add to that we have a question from Chirag that I think fits in really well here is, what does the journey look like to get business and suppliers on board? I think that lines up well.

Steven Kekich:

That's a great question. I think anytime you're doing this type of activity, it gives you an opportunity to reset. And you get a chance to reset your standards, you get a chance to reset your supplier base, you get a chance to reset your policies and stuff like that.

And so from an approach standpoint, with change management, I think again, it's specific to what works within your organization. So I'm going to give you both ends of the spectrum. But think about steering a big ship.

And a lot of these companies are big ships. If you do a little at a time, you can ultimately get to where you're going. But sometimes people don't put up as big of a fight because you get there gradually. And you build them up to it.

And that's one thing I've found in my time at a lot of these large organizations is even though, based on your experience, you can provide the data, you know that this is the right thing to do. You can again, build a business case, you can get stakeholders to support you. It usually takes four or five steps to actually get to where you want to go.

And you have to prove yourself along the way. So I think from a communication standpoint, what I've seen be successful is let's get a win. But let's not go too far out and break everybody's vision of what something is, but show them the value and then get the credibility and continue to move on there.

Steven Kekich:

So I think that's what's worked before. Another way to look at it too is, I know there's some organizations where they're very inclined to do a test case. Can you get one business unit or something to do and then look to expand. Or some of these clients that are in different countries, can I take Americas? Or where am I growing? Where do I have a lot of oversight that's needed?

Maybe with all this stuff that's happening in the UK, you say, hey, I want to take control of that spend and make sure that independent contractors are getting out there and do that. And so you've got a business case for that and then you can see how it applies to the rest of your organization.

Erika Novak:

Let's hit the second part of Chirag's question. The suppliers. I think that is what gives a lot of people trepidation, getting the staff and suppliers on board with the percentage of spend and then how you've priced it. Now you get the staff, now you get the larger suppliers, now you get some big heavyweights who are spending millions and now you're saying come through this different door.

And we haven't quite hit on whether it's your procurement team facilitating your MSPs. So I do want to hit that second way. But let's talk about what you're communicating to the suppliers about this new process and how does that go and what resistance have you felt?

Steven Kekich:

Well I think the first thing you have to do is you have to talk to your suppliers. Any good business owner, procurement person would tell you, let's make sure this has some value to them.

And they have to understand why they're paying and playing for whatever it is, for that. And so I know that as I've done preferred supplier RFPs or vendor consolidations or things like that, the first thing you do is talk to them and make sure that the process fits them.

I think at the end of the day with the amount of spend, suppliers, this isn't a new thing, they'll figure it out and they'll get there. And quite frankly, if they can't, then maybe they're not the right supplier for you.

Erika Novak:

So if you're trying to sell this is good for the supplier. What's the value to them?

Steven Kekich:

It's a good question. I think the value to them is I'm looking to consolidate my supplier base and to work with better, stronger suppliers. And typically how I've gone into these types of situations is I've said, I don't have the data in the system to know who's good and bad. And so I'm going to reset. I'm going to redefine what that is.

All the suppliers get an opportunity, hopefully a fair opportunity to participate in this space. And then as we make consolidation or cuts in the future, then you're going to be a part of that.

So part of it is just the larger scale. I want you to be a part of this business and I'm going to... How do I want to say this? As you've got a larger overview of the spend you're able to encourage or supply opportunities to these suppliers for places where they wouldn't have had that before.

Because with this overarching function you're able to provide business owners with data. These people are actually doing good based on your metrics or these people aren't.

And so now you've got a value proposition for the suppliers to say if you are performing well within other areas of business, I now have the ability to provide you with new opportunities. Because I now have that data. And I can really say I feel strongly about this and I can show somebody within my organization to do that.

I would say from a process and efficiencies standpoint, there are some improvements there. If you can get on a standard contract with people or some of those types of things to make things go faster, you're taking that timeline, to get their people active and on project, reduced. So hopefully you're putting money in their pocket as well.

Erika Novak:

I think that's what I've seen the most with people. The value to the supplier is just... Even they'll say, we may shove things too. It usually takes one or two years to get the right data. So it's a long term thing for a supplier.

But the immediate value you're right is the contract efficiency. You're in here, we can get more work for you, you speed it up. So it's not these three to four, to six month contract cycles.

Steven Kekich:

I think we all know in business. A lot of things that you do, you plant seeds. And they don't always bear fruit or they don't come to fruition. But that's one of the things that you're asking the suppliers to buy into and do. And hopefully you've formed the relationship and the credibility that they buy into it and they believe in it.

And I would just challenge all of the procurement people or even not the procurement people, don't be thinking about beating the crap out of suppliers in six months. Let's think about the long-term and they need to make money too but we want them to do it in a way that's not egregious and where we're getting great quality from them.

Erika Novak:

Let me combine a couple of thoughts that you've said, because we know there's power players out there in the supplier world who will say, nope, not playing, get them, make me. They'll try to arm themselves with the business people and your team saying, I'm not going to go through this program. I want to go separately.

Let's say this is either HR or procurement, how do you as a CW program owner bring those business teams who are working with those suppliers to say, it's us together saying you need to do this, not you with the supplier saying we're not going to do this.

Because, we know that happens quite a bit. A small group going into the SOW and even staffing module. And then there's folks who fight it and try to say, I don't have to because you're a senior VP of something, since I don't. How do you help? What's the advice that you give people on that?

Steven Kekich:

So when I started, I fought tooth and nail on things like that and I thought it was my mission to control everything. And now in my wiser years as some of the gray hairs are coming in, I just don't really care as much. I think at the end of the day, I'm not here to control 100% of the spend. I am a support function in procurement and I'm here to help consolidate. I'm here to help standardize. I'm here to help inform stakeholders.

And at the end of the day, they have to make the decisions that are best for their business in what they see is appropriate. And so I've gotten away from trying to fight. I think I'll tell somebody, I'll tell them a second time, I'll provide them data and if they still want to go and do their route at the end of the day, they have to answer to somebody else for those types of things. And I'm just not too worried about it. And I've accepted the fact that there are some places that just aren't worth the fight and the time and effort to get it.

And so as I look at these types of things, I'm not worried about the 100% anymore. And I think I challenge everybody just to think about that. There is a critical mass. There is a place where you can get to and be very satisfied and ultimately know you're providing a great value to the company.

Erika Novak:

I liked that one. When we were chatting a little bit earlier, you had mentioned if you've moved the bar from 20% to 80% it's a phenomenal change. And so an 80 to a 100 and probably the value you're going to get on that is much smaller, but you can be proud of that movement. It's not a failure if you haven't closed the loop on every single thing.

Steven Kekich:

Absolutely.

Saad Asad:

I want to jump into some questions we have from the audience, so Sean asks, with most large organizations having low or no visibility into hundreds of millions of professional services spend, an obvious business case for saving tens of millions simply from gaining visibility as the bottom layer of the pyramid as you've described. Why is it so hard to get C suite to lead the charge and use technology and governance in order to accelerate adoption?

Steven Kekich:

Wow. That's a great question. There's so many ways you could go with that. Part of it is organizational. I was with a growth company in the Bay Area and we could get money to do almost anything.

And the approval process and the business case to do some of those things in a growth mode was much different. Also, working in financial services there's places where mitigating the risk and just making sure that the governance and compliance is there, is much more important.

So there's some companies that honestly don't really care about savings. There's other companies that, and when I say don't care, I mean it's not their priority, this is again, me speaking bluntly a little bit.

But what you really have to look at is what is the thing that is going to move the needle for those people and what derives value within the organization. And while to you and I, it obviously is savings and there's huge opportunities for it. Some people just don't resonate with that.

So I think looking at the business case and trying to understand what those different levers are that some of this can impact and how it applies to the C suite.

And maybe you're going too high. Maybe it's finding, again, someone that's really influential within the business or somebody that does have a lot of spend and just getting them on board and saying, hey, we'll do it for you.

I know when I was at another company that was very large, trying to tackle anything globally just didn't happen. And so what we did is we took a subsidiary, we took one of the business units that was the highest growth, highest brand name recognition, one that I'm sure many people here use, and we got them on board with it and the thought was, hey, if we can solve this for them, done.

Because they have the toughest use cases, they have a good amount of spend and everything that we do here should be applicable again to 80% of the rest of the company. So maybe that's a different way to think about it. And if you have other questions, I mean feel free to ping me.

Saad Asad:

I think this one may have to be our last question. This one is from Scott, of what level of expertise in the mechanics of individual SOW service categories should be expected from the sponsor of a contingent program looking to expand into SOW?

Steven Kekich:

That's a great question. I think it goes back to Erika's question of really who governs this or who controls it. And I've been on both sides of the fence. I've had an MSP do it and I've also had internal programs do it.

And the majority of people are going to use an MSP. And I think that's probably the right decision for most companies. And the reason for that is because they do it for so many other clients. They have this global expertise and they can pull in insights and people very quickly to help support that.

And so I would say the owner of the CW program or process doesn't have to know all of that. Bring in the experts. The CW program can lead the way with policies or procedures or efficiencies or translating what's important to the business and then having others execute that for them.

And so again, I think an MSP does that very well. As long as you can agree to what those requirements are and what you want them to do.

Sometimes it's very transactional. I just want someone to be there and communicate with the worker or with the stakeholders and make sure all of the things are filled out correctly. Then you go to the other end of the spectrum where these are people that actually have procurement knowledge and expertise and help build the deliverables of an SOW.

And so there's a lot of extremes that you can go to. I do want to touch base on why would you do it internally. Why would someone ever want to take this on? The thought process when I did it at one of my stops was we can do this better, cheaper, and we have more ownership with what we're doing.

Now the caveat I'll say there, is what we were working on there was much tighter. It was just temporary workers and it was basic program information and so we didn't necessarily need the knowledge base and the skillset that other companies would need.

And I don't want to call it level one or level two, but it wasn't the top of the pyramid, again. Where I think if you want to move faster and do some of those things and MSP is absolutely the way to go. Because that's not an expertise of a lot of us here.

Erika Novak:

And let me just add one more thing, I think, for the listeners to understand. Is internal versus MSP, but for your MSP team, if you are expecting them to have a procurement expertise, it's a very different price, right?

So when you go into negotiate of who are those people and what are their skillsets, again it matches the function that we were asking them to do. The more you go up, the higher price it's going to be and expect this type of functionality and experience at this price is incredibly unrealistic.

Let me close out with just one last question for you, to those who may be going to RFP, those who are going through demos, what do you wish you would have asked that you uncovered later that you would encourage folks to say, ask early, look early, decide early before you either make your decision or make sure that you understand this? What's something you could help guide?

Steven Kekich:

I was thinking about this and I think you actually said something that was super impactful here, is this isn't going to be a short term fix. It takes a while to get this and to get the data and to get the process to where you want to go.

So I think the one thing that a lot of people go in, is when you maybe implement a temporary program. It's a little more simple with the rate card or with some of those types of things.

But if you think about the complexities of SOW and what a lot of organizations do, either the change management of saying, hey, these are now the standards that people have to follow, is very difficult. And it really doesn't make sense in a lot of companies to just implement that, full stop.

I think again, where I've seen success, and maybe this is the Bay area where people are just a little bit more warm and fuzzy, but you tell them, hey, I'll let you do it this time. Here's the grace period of six months. But this is what you need to do in the future. And then these are the standards that you're going to have.

And so you don't change things overnight. And just being able to understand that these things take time, I think was one of the biggest challenges that I had. Because I expected to see some results a little bit more quickly.

And then the other thing I'll say too, is all of the clients are different into what you're trying to get out of this. And I've been at places where we said if it's an SOW, it has to be deliverable based. We just won't allow TNM. It's just not going to happen. So if you're going to do TNM and you have to have that, it's going to be temporary work. And with temporary work, then maybe there's different contracts or different vendors or things like that.

And the point was trying to make the SOW vendors move to a deliverable based thing. Even if they're building their SOW saying, hey, we're going to get nine people at $175 an hour for six months and that equals this.

And then we're going to do it every month for a sixth of it to pay it out. But at least there's deliverables where now they have some skin in the game and we're not paying them if they don't deliver to what that acceptance criteria is.

So I think the other thing that you really have to think about as a company is what are we trying to get out of this and what is acceptable for our key stakeholders as far as that goes. And making sure that you build that in. I'll say one more thing because I just thought of something as well.

One thing too where these systems are awesome and where the SOW module is awesome is the integrations with other systems. Whether it's timekeeping, whether it's budgeting or whether it's doing those things internally. I think it's also asking questions about, hey, what is the process that we have today? Why do we have that and can this improve it or make it better? Because there are a lot of old processes.

And really the reason I say integrations is because something I've worked at for a long time is trying to make sure that people only do things in one system. I don't want a worker to enter time in two systems. I don't want a budget approval in two systems. Those types of things. You really need to think about as to how can we integrate those. What is the possibility to do that.

And some of those things are very technically difficult. And so getting referrals from people who are trying to do the same thing. In validating with them are some of the best conversations I've ever had. Hey, MSP or VMS told me I could do this.

What is your real life experience? And then they come back and sometimes it's great and sometimes it's like, oh man, it's two years and we still haven't been able to do. So I think build up a community and talk to some people as well. Just don't believe everything the salespeople tell you.

Erika Novak:

I love that. So I think, let me just recap that. Is making sure you understand why. Is it for data? Is it for function? Is it just pushing staff aug. versus deliverables. What's the real reason? Study long term expectations. This is not six months, we've nailed it, mission accomplished. This is a one to two year. Do we get cost savings? Do we centralize? Are people on board? Do we have the data?

So the value proposition needs to be a long-term. Executives are not going to see this turnaround in nine months and may hear complaints until you get there. And then the last idea is just work with your network.

So work with a network to say, what did that person sell me versus what actually happens? How does it implement? Really go get the real stories from people who're in a safe spot. Not like, hey was this terrible. But just really find out things that you should be thinking of and testing against the entire time. So you use it for expectations. Is that a good summary?

Steven Kekich:

Yeah, I think that's great. Because the thing that we have to remember too is my goals are so much different than my clients and my stakeholders. At the end of the day, they just want to get that person there or that project team staffed and get it done. And they don't care if it's temporary or SOW or any of this.

So that's the thing I like about the centralized management of this, is you get a small team of experts that can provide that level of service. Whether it's white glove, whether it's self-service. But you've built up some of that capital to provide that.

Because that's a hell of a lot easier than trying to train 1,000, 5,000, 10,000 people, users of contingent workers as to what is to do. And it's just not worth it. I think the other thing too is, especially in this day and age, there's so many people moving through different positions in different companies that a lot of that information isn't retained.

Or even if I did a training, six months later when I actually meet a contingent worker, it's like, well, what do I do? I don't remember that. So thinking about what are ways that the system and the process can allow you to get through that more.

And then it helps support some of the goals that I have either in HR or procurement. So I don't tell them that. Because there are some managers that don't care about cost savings. That's the finance people.

So sometimes just be aware too what those things are. And I'll relate it to a resume since we're all in the business. I remember I used to have a resume that was two or three pages and I had all these different things and when I was applying to a position, I went through and said these things don't apply.

And I took it off my master one. Then I saved it and I did it for that. It's what are all the values that I could add for this. And then as you're talking to people, picking out the ones that really impact them. And it's cool cause you've got all this stuff that works for the organization, but it's obviously not going to apply to every individual the same.

Erika Novak:

I completely agree with you. We expect everyone to be such a set of experts in everything. And so the system of process that you have in place should make it very simple for managers. My last thought on this is if you're having an MSP, take care of this on your behalf. Make sure you are interviewing the people who are coming on board ,who are supposed to be the experts.

The assumption is these guys know better or whatnot. So making sure you test it out. Yes, they know, they can speak to it over the phone, over email and in the system.

The worst thing you can do is set this all up and expect the team to be on board and they're just not quite ready to go live. So it makes sure that you actually are interviewing the people so you feel you can stand behind them. So I want to close this out. I know we're over time.

Saad Asad:

Yep. Thank you all for joining. We'll be having more of these in the coming weeks. So be on the lookout for more. And thank you all again.

Similar posts

Get notified of the latest insights on extended workforce management

Subscribe to get invitations to exclusive events, interviews with contingent workforce program leads, and the latest research on best practices for extended workforce programs for Workday customers.