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5 Best Practices that Can Enhance Your Staffing Program ROI

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No company can operate without expenses, and that includes the cost of a productive workforce. In 2015, businesses in the U.S. spent more than $126.4 billion on temporary and contract staffing. However, in the long run, working with a staffing partner can provide your business with substantial gains.

So, how can you best position your company to drive the strongest return on your staffing program investment? Here are five best practices to point you in the right direction.

1) Establish Clear Communication Channels

First, you’ll have to make sure that your organization has clearly established procedures for sharing expectations, data and policies across departments. You don’t want a miscommunication to keep you from the fill rate you need, the time-to-fill you require or the output quality you expect.

Identify point people and establish protocols for how human resources, finance, security, production and your staffing partner will get on the same page when it comes to your contingent workforce. Who consults with your staffing program team and under what circumstances? A good staffing partner will work with you to iron out these procedures during program implementation.

2) Raise Your Data Standards

Next, you’ll want to partner with a staffing provider that leverages technology to analyze your contingent workforce needs and to create the most effective and efficient program possible. If your staffing partner doesn’t use data to forecast the number of workers you need, but they instead rely on guesswork or they simply draw from prior experience, then you could be in trouble; they’ll likely have to overestimate how many associates they’ll need to recruit and assign in order to be sure you have enough people. Conversely, if your staffing partner underestimates your need and doesn’t provide you with enough workers, you’ll be stuck paying overtime to make up for the deficiency. These unanticipated expenses can eat into the long-term cost savings you’d expect to receive by using a contingent workforce.

Without accurate data, it’ll also be harder for you and your staffing partner to track ROI accurately. Your staffing partner should generate regular reports that allow you to observe your program’s performance relative to your established service level agreements (SLAs) and your unique goals.

Cutting-edge workforce management software, like Stafftrack by Staff Management | SMX, can help you manage your staffing program efficiently and effectively. Our teams use Stafftrack to avoid overtime costs, monitor for potential safety issues and keep productivity rates on track to meet your big-picture goals. With the actionable data provided by Stafftrack, the team can generate a blueprint for continuous improvement strategies and for even greater ROI in the future.

3) Lower Your Risk

In addition to streamlining communication and leveraging data to operate with maximum efficiency, you want to make sure you don’t incur unintended expenses or take on unnecessary risk. Such problems could come in the form of workplace accidents, worker misclassification or bad publicity.

To steer clear of these risks, make sure that your staffing partner has a proven commitment to workplace safety and that they use stringent worker verification and classification processes. In particular, you should partner with a staffing provider that is Workers’ Compensation Risk Certified. WRC Certified companies exceed staffing industry safety standards, and their procedures have been verified by an independent party.

In order to ensure that the workers who join your ranks are eligible to do so, look for staffing providers that use the E-Verify system and have received IMAGE certification from U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. IMAGE certification demonstrates a commitment to sourcing eligible workers.

Work with your staffing partner to find out whether they classify workers as employees or independent contractors, and make sure you understand the criteria they use to determine these classifications. Your staffing partner should also perform regular audits to make sure workers are in compliance with regulatory requirements. Stafftrack helps Staff Management | SMX to quickly rectify potential issues and reduce risk.

4) Standardize the Work

This step applies to both the work undertaken by your contingent workers and the administrative processes used by your staffing partner.

In order to uphold production quality expectations and safety standards, formalize any procedures that will be carried out by your staffing partner’s associates. Create standard operating procedures (SOPs) in order to ensure that specific tasks are performed the same way every time, no matter who does them. SOPs will provide new workers and their supervisors with reference points for the safe and efficient completion of essential tasks.

Your staffing partner should have a standardized process for onboarding workers and monitoring compliance with government and site-specific regulations. Staffing partners that have a standardized procedure for processing paperwork, drug screenings and safety audits, as well as any other repeatable tasks, tend to be more effective than those that don’t.

5) Define Success

How can you strive toward success if you don’t know what it looks like for you?

Different operations require different outcomes. Work with your staffing partner to define what results your operation demands and create SLAs. Once SLAs are completed, come to an agreement about how they’ll be measured and tracked, and on what reporting should be done. A high-quality staffing partner will develop action plans to meet these goals.

If you don’t work toward specific goals, you might take unnecessary steps that waste resources, which would lower your ROI. Alternatively, if you only have murky goals, your results might not meet your expectations, and it’ll be more difficult to assess or achieve high ROI. Neither you nor your staffing partner will want to squander resources or be left wondering if you’ve achieved your desired results.

With concrete goals in mind, high-quality staffing partners will collaborate with you and offer solutions that help achieve greater ROI.

Some staffing partners even offer a pay-for-performance pricing option. Using this option means that instead of getting billed for the hours worked by each associate, you get billed for the results of that labor. Working this way allows you to calculate your ROI more easily, and it limits the amount of guesswork you have to undertake when forecasting your contingent workforce budget.

Return on Investment Is About the Choices You Make

You’re responsible for making many of the decisions that determine the ROI of your staffing program, and that starts with finding a staffing partner that shares your vision. When all is said and done, both you and your partner will need to take proactive steps to enhance the ROI of your staffing program. Together, you can take on the tasks of streamlining your data-sharing and workflow processes, reducing risk, creating SOPs, and defining goals and SLAs for your program.

Find a staffing partner that will join you in the process. Learn about the different types of staffing models and discover which one is right for your facility by reading our ebook Staffing Made Simple with the Staffing Model Assessment Tool >

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