Everything You Need to Know About a Blended Workforce

What Is a Blended Workforce?

The pandemic has forever changed the way the office works. The working from home culture has made a paradigm shift that conventional office culture will never truly recover from. All things considered, that is a good thing, as conventional office culture needed to change. 

In fact, it was on the cusp of change when the pandemic forced everyone’s hand. Companies were looking into other strategies and deciding on what to do and where to go. One of the novel ideas being thrown around was the possibility of a blended workforce. In this article, we will discuss comprehensively what it is, what benefits it brings, and how to implement such a system.

For the longest time, an office consisted of only full-time employees. It was seen as the only way to do things. However, blended workforces tout a very different mindset. It doesn’t scrap the idea of full-time employees, but it also engages other types of schedules.

Essentially, it involves keeping a core set of full-time employees who need to do everyday work around the office and hire a ring of temporary gig workers to support them. These temporary employees would be specialists in their field and can include:

• Freelancers
• Contractors
• Temporary workers
• On-demand workers
• Part-time workers

What this does is create a mix of talents - a truly blended workforce. Free from the need to hire full-time employees for every role, you can create a blend of talent that suits your company. Mixing and matching is the biggest strength this system allows, but that is not all it has to offer.

Advantages to a Blended Workforce

As an HR manager, if you are tasked with looking into new ways of maximizing output, you might have come across the blended workforce strategy. Maybe you read about it. Maybe you heard about it in conversations. The thing you need to know is whether it works for you, and for that, you should consider the advantages it gives you:

1. People can and do quit at any time. And when they do, it is up to you to fill that role as fast as you can. In such a situation, you can find an individual or a group easily and quickly if you look for temps and contractors. This is cheaper since such hires don’t come with a benefits package like other full or part-time employees.
2. In industries that experience an increase in demand and production at certain times of the year, or are preparing to scale up for some reason or another, the blended workforce strategy works brilliantly. For the period of growth, you can hire temps and freelancers. Make your contracts for the boom period - a month or two - and go back to normal afterward.
3. You seldom get the time to make the perfect hire. However, until you do, you can hire a temp or a contractor to fill in the role. In the meantime, you can keep looking for the elusive perfect hire. Or, sometimes, maybe the temporary worker will end up becoming the missing piece to your puzzle!
4. Freelancers and temps often have a vast collection of eclectic skills which they have built up over the years. In looking, you will find people with talents more diverse than your regular employee. This opens new doors for the ways in which you can use them, making independent contractors a very flexible asset to be used in innovative ways.

How to Successfully Implement a Blended Workforce

You now know just how a blended workforce can help you out. However, how do you go about implementing that in the workplace? Freelancers don’t just drop from the sky. You have to go looking for them.

Incidentally, this is the first step in the chain. What you need is a sourcing tool. Somewhere to find the talent you seek. This can be temp agencies, or sites like LinkedIn and Fiverr where people post their profiles and skills. Thanks to the meteoric rise of the gig economy in recent times, there is no shortage of places where you can find reliable temporary talent.

As an HR manager, you need to do the usual as well. Post job descriptions on sites and social media outlets, reach out to recruiters, etc. The most important part of this is knowing exactly what you need out of the people you are looking to hire.

Develop a Blended Workforce With Lanteria

The idea of a blended workforce has been around for a long time, though it is only recently that it was defined properly. If you are looking to implement a blended workforce, we at Lanteria are best poised to help. With over fifteen years of experience, more than 200,000 satisfied customers, and a presence in over forty countries, Lanteria will help you employ and empower the best talent you can hope to find. The recruitment portal of our HR management platform enables you to manage job listings, streamline recruitment and onboarding processes, collaborate with applicants, and centralize a candidate database. Feel free to reach out to us any time.