May 15, 2012 |
I moderated two roundtables on Tuesday about UK trends in contingent workforce management, at SIA’s CWS Summit in London. During the roundtables, about two dozen attendees discussed several notable trends:
- Agency Worker Regulation (AWR): Since coming into effect last October, this is the hottest topic in the UK temporary staffing sector. The key question is, does AWR affect price or demand for temporary workers? The consensus was a clear “no” – one attendee said that AWR was like the Y2K crisis, lots of discussion and preparation but very little real impact.
- Skill Shortages: Attendees noted that there were some skills shortages in high-end IT skill sets that were driving up rates, and suppliers were submitting the same candidates more often which indicates the available talent pools are reduced. The days of requiring 5-10% rate reductions during the downturn a few years ago seem to be over.
- Expanding Programs into the UK: Rather than simply expanding existing US programs into the UK, attendees mentioned they were revisiting who the best providers would be and altering program approaches for the UK market, for both contingent workforce management and recruitment process outsourcing (RPO).
- Change Management: There was much discussion around reducing maverick spend and expanding programs. Attendees noted that a high-touch help approach (most often by an MSP) and indicating the cost and compliance/security benefits were effective at driving change – but only if pursued persistently.
- Additional Regulations: Upcoming regulations that affect temporary workers and the staffing agencies include Pensions Act auto-enrollment changes coming in October, and Real-Time Information (RTI) for PAYE workers. While these regulation changes only affect staffing agencies, proactive buyers are requiring staffing agencies to describe their plans for complying with the regulations.
May 14, 2012 |
IQNavigator was honored to receive the CODiE award for the Best Supply Chain Management Solution by the SIIA on May 10, 2012. As a finalist in both categories (Supply Chain AND Human Capital Management) for two years running, it felt great to be named the winner!
Having spent much of my career at large Fortune 100 firms, it never ceases to amaze me how our 350+ person, Denver-based company provides such a mission-critical solution for so many of the world’s best known brands. Of course, the first part of Lincoln’s quote is, “Don’t worry when you are not recognized…”, a sentiment I’ve seen play out time and again as our developers, UI, implementation and client services teams work tirelessly to improve what we do every day for our global clients. I’m proud of our team at IQNavigator. Read more about why SIIA chose us here.
PS – Don’t quite buy how a VMS is “mission-critical”? Give me a holler – I’ve got my facts and figures to help prove it.
May 4, 2012 |
If you have a passion for services procurement (and who doesn’t 
), it is tempting to think really big about the future state of the profession and the possibilities that lie ahead: a single category management construct that supports, manages, reports and analyzes on all of the different services spend types in one place. And… a services category manager playing the role of marionette, optimizing all the channels, realizing all the savings, managing all the vendors, controlling all the risks… harmoniously, efficiently, perfectly. Ah, dare to dream.
I suppose that utopia is possible, but I certainly have never seen or heard of such an organization- if any of you have, let me know! But I do think it is what we software makers, service providers, procurement folk, etc. should be shooting for with our objectives and goals. If that dream is not the highest order desired end state for services procurement, then what is?
The way our industry (procurement, procurement services, technology, etc) compartmentalize ‘services’ or ‘services procurement’ as a single, tangible, umbrella-like category thingy (my technical term of the day) suggests that all of the subcategories of services underneath have a common linkage at some point in the hierarchy. Is that commonality an actual, leveragable touch point for procurement to extract tangible value? Or is it simply the definition of services itself:
*Services Definition (*I got this definition from BusinessDictionary.com at http://www.businessdictionary.com/definition/services.html#ixzz1tFXm45JM You should try their Term of the Day email subscription – very cool.)
Intangible products such as accounting, banking, cleaning, consultancy, education, insurance, expertise, medical treatment, or transportation. Sometimes services are difficult to identify because they are closely associated with a good. No transfer of possession or ownership takes place when services are sold, and they (1) cannot be stored or transported, (2) are instantly perishable, and (3) come into existence at the time they are bought and consumed.
What is the leveragable category management linkage between accounting and transportation services? Or cleaning and consultancy services? Does managing all of these services in some intentional cohesive and coordinated way add substantial incremental value to the sum of values driven by managing them separately?
Maybe the commonality is not a question of “what” at all; maybe it is a question of “how.” Is how we buy and consume these services the only perceptible link across all services? And is that how a SOW?
*Statement of work (SOW) Definition (*ditto – http://www.businessdictionary.com/definition/statement-of-work-SOW.html#ixzz1tFekXpvN )
Detailed description of the specific services or tasks a contractor is required to perform under a contract. SOW is usually incorporated in a contract, indirectly by reference or directly as an attachment.
The rules of Philosophical Friday require me to leave you dangling at this point… Have a great weekend everybody!
May 2, 2012 |
The end of March marked six months since Agency Worker Regulations (AWR) came into fruition across the UK. Recently two reports have appeared touching upon the impact of AWR on hiring trends among the temporary workforce. The first, from the Recruitment and Employment Confederation (REC), drew the conclusion that a recent drop in temporary hiring (and rise in permanent recruitment) was attributable to AWR. Conversely, the annual Navigator report by Randstad, used case studies to demonstrate AWR has had no negative impact on the use of temporary labour.
The different conclusions can largely be explained by the context of each study. The drop in temporary hiring reported by the REC is not surprising when taking into consideration the UK economy registered negative growth during Q4 in 2011 partly due to a slowdown in financial services, a mature user of temporary labour.
Randstad’s conclusions are similar to those we at IQNavigator are seeing amongst our UK clients – the use of temporary labour remains consistent with few, if any, changes to the pay of temporary resources. The majority of changes are directed toward standardising compliance policies and procedures around the roles temporary resources fill and quickly being able to map those roles to their permanent equivalents.
Ahead of the introduction of AWR, there was understandable concern the new regulations could make it less attractive for employers to invest in the temporary workforce. While there are conflicting reports about what effect AWR has had in that regard, from our perspective the effects have so far been minimal. In fact, our clients have been able to quickly react to the standardising changes mentioned above in part because they utilize a Vendor Management System (VMS). Vendor Management Systems usually prove highly useful to organisations that want to standardise and automate temporary labour policies, provide real-time visibility into their temporary labour resources, and mitigate risks associated with complying with new laws such as AWR. This usually results in significant savings on both the time and back-end costs organisations may incur in complying with AWR, and in my opinion is a mitigating factor of why our UK-based clients have not made a noticeable reduction in temporary labour investments.
April 18, 2012 |
Our just released IQNdex explores temp trends
Today we released our latest IQNdex report covering recent movement in temp labor bill rates in the 1st Quarter of 2012. Now celebrating our first year anniversary of the launch of IQNdex, we have been monitoring temporary labor bill rates and comparing the trends to whatever happens to be going on (really going on, behind the noise) with US employment.
Certainly, the economy and employment take top billing in headlines across the country almost every day (and especially the first Friday of each month with the BLS reports) – but how often are we hearing the unpopular truth? Employee salaries are continuing to rise – yes, they do and they did — even during the recession. But what of temp labor bill rates?
Our IQNdex shows temp labor is much more a reflection of the changes in market demand. I would venture this is a good thing for the companies that are driving our economy – the more nimble the Fortune 500 can be in responding to economic fluctuations, the more stable our business economy ultimately will be. Find out more by downloading today’s IQNdex report, available here.
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