A dynamic workforce encompasses employees who serve in a central corporate office and a team that works outside the office. This combination is necessary to secure new business, protect market positions, and grow revenue and profit.
It has become the norm as businesses try to limit the number of office workers to control the spread of COVID-19. Nowadays, it’s common for employees to work from home and report to the office only when necessary.
Maintaining a dynamic workforce brings new technological challenges. You have to keep remote workers and the management connected to enable collaboration.
Let’s discuss how IT supports dynamic workforces.
Dynamic Workforces Challenges
Here are some of the challenges of a dynamic workforce setup that a robust business communication system can solve.
Information Sharing
Some tasks require different employees to work together and share information. Your organization needs a powerful communication system that enables smooth sharing of voice, text, video, and images.
Furthermore, the solution should enable smooth data syncing across different devices. Your team should stay updated about work progress regardless of their location or the device in use.
Personal Touch
Since your employees and customers are in different places, you need a communication system that intensifies human interactions necessary for collaboration and camaraderie.
The solution should enable smooth bidirectional conversations, including texting, audio calls, video conferencing, and virtual meetings. Such an interactive communication system embraces individuals by engaging them on the channels they prefer.
Geographical Separation
With many employees working in different locations, you need a reliable communication network that allows seamless communication 24/7. It should be powerful enough to connect multiple business premises, homes, computers, and mobile devices. Geographical separation and time zone differences should not be a problem.
Communication System Configuration
If communication is critical for your company’s productivity, you require an easy-to-use platform that you can operate even without IT expertise. You don’t need to call a technician to add or remove users and devices. You should be able to configure the system as needed from any location.
How to Create a Productive Dynamic Workforce
Organizations are shifting from full-time workers to a more system of flexible workers. Here is how you can start to build your dynamic workforce.
Embrace Different Types of Talent
Traditionally, organizations would hire young employees who would rise the ranks to retire with prestigious titles. Today’s workers want more flexibility and independence.
A dynamic workforce comprises a mix of permanent employees and temporary and contingent workers, independent contractors, consultants. Non-permanent employees choose to work that way because of the freedom they have to pursue their interests.
Hidden talent is often available in modern populations where individuals prefer gigs to permanent employment. By embracing a mix of workers, you have the best chance to reach and engage the brightest employees.
Increased hiring flexibility enables companies to be agile enough to adjust to changing market demands and other business fluctuations.
Vet Meticulously
A dynamic workforce has full-time and part-time employees, all of them with unique working behaviors. Since most workers perform their roles autonomously, it’s in your best interest to be careful when shortlisting and vetting candidates.
Remember, a mistake by one employee is enough to compromise your entire business empire. Indeed, some of the worst hacking incidents have succeeded due to a careless act by one employee.
There’s always the risk of infiltration, so you should screen your remote workforce with the same diligence you would apply when hiring an in-house employee. Watch out for the malicious impostors, disgruntled workers, negligent employees, and double agents. These individuals have the highest likelihood of crippling your business.
A dedicated attacker can disguise themselves as honest job applicants in interviews. You can pinpoint such individuals by insisting on in-person interactions initially or regular video meetings. That way, you can reduce the chance of hiring a different person from the one who applied for the job.
Utilize Technology
Technology provides a means to access and recruit a dynamic workforce. It facilitates sourcing, shortlisting, and delivering talent on demand. The right tools can manage candidate relationships, check social channels, evaluate skill levels, and provide analytics about applicants.
It also eliminates repetitive tasks to make the best use of humans. Furthermore, technology enables seamless, real-time communication between field workers and office employees.
Fortunately, you can use cloud-based solutions that need little input when it comes to implementation. You don’t even need a dedicated in-house team to oversee the system. If you wish, you can white-label technology to integrate it smoothly with your human resource information system.
Overall, technology hastens your talent acquisition process. It creates a win-win for HR officers who are relentlessly looking to onboard top talent and field workers who want to connect with the headquarters from any location.
Cultivate a Sense of Belonging
If you have a dynamic workforce, there’s always the chance of some parties feeling physically and psychologically isolated. It can hamper teamwork and make your working environment unpleasant and unproductive.
Promote unity and teamwork by organizing events for the entire workforce. If physical meetings aren’t viable, plan periodical virtual meetings using a reliable video conferencing tool to bring everyone together. It will encourage your employees to open up to one another, facilitating collaboration.
Establish Accountability Procedures
You cannot supervise a remote worker completely, which brings another security concern in dynamic workforces. Experts insist that organizations should ensure their employees are up to date with the latest cybersecurity practices.
While you cannot police your employees round the clock, you can test their behaviors periodically. You can remotely monitor the actions of a computer user connected to your network in several ways.
Clarify to your team that there will be consequences for anyone who compromises security intentionally or out of carelessness. Apply software-based monitoring solutions to see what workers are doing. Periodical security audits on randomly selected individuals can have your workforce take security more seriously.
Prioritize Access Control
Intruders have a better chance to infiltrate your system when you have remote workers connected to your corporate network. A seasoned hacker can easily impersonate a legitimate user. Therefore, your IT department should focus on proper network access controls to ensure users are who they claim to be.
A good starting point is through multi-factor authentication, where users have to complete at least two authentication procedures to access a system. Rule-based access control allows workers to access your network under a set of rules for each person. The administrator sets access rules based on each user’s duties.
Importance of Workplace Engagement
One aspect you should cultivate when dealing with a dynamic workforce of engagement. According to a recent Gallup Survey, about 51 percent of workers aren’t engaged at the workplace. That isn’t good for business, given that high employee engagement boosts productivity by 21 percent.
When employees are working in different locations, you need to harmonize communication to promote engagement. It increases company loyalty and reduces absentee days. It takes creative communication and feedback sharing to achieve organizational growth.
One cause for reduced engagement in dynamic workforce systems is a communication breakdown between field workers and the corporate office. Many times, employees have challenges trying to communicate with one another using external tools.
The inability to find relevant parties frustrates collaboration and slows processes down, resulting in poor performance.
Solve this problem with a communication hub with multiple channels to connect your dynamic workforce securely in real-time.
Communication Solution for Dynamic Workforces
Most likely, not everyone in your team can handle new technology. You need a frictionless, intuitive communication system that non-tech members can use comfortably.
The network should be available away from the office to accommodate remote workers who constantly require to connect with in-house employees. Find a mobile-first solution that keeps everyone connected via mobile devices when they are on the go.
Additionally, there’s a need to have a universal communication platform for the entire organization, right from the executive to frontline workers. It allows you to send important announcements to everyone and receive updates from various employees or departments effortlessly.
Consider a communication hub with the following features:
Real-Time Chat
Replace emails, which sometimes get disorganized and go to the wrong folders, with real-time text messaging. You can connect with staff or learners through a text-messaging solution that integrates with your information systems securely.
High-Capacity Meetings
Choose a communication network that allows users to join video and audio-only conversations as needed. It should support tens of video-streaming participants with the ability to change views, record sessions, and share files.
Organization-wide Announcements
Find a tool that enables you to send one-way announcements to the entire organization. You’ll keep your staff or students updated about important events, emergencies, safety information, and any information you wish to convey quickly.
Live Message Translation
If you have workers from different regions, a communication platform that translates messages to other languages is a plus. Employees can chat in their languages where the platform delivers content in the recipient’s preferred language.
File Sharing & Storage
Your team needs to share different file types like documents, presentations, images, spreadsheets, videos, and more. Make file-sharing a breeze by providing your dynamic workforce with a platform that supports all file types.
All-in-One Business Communication Network
Pronto Meetings is a versatile communication tool for all users regardless of their technological expertise. It connects individuals via video and chat, enabling employees to work smarter and students to learn better.
Contact sales for a free demo.