Effective Staff Augmentation Strategy Can Make All the Difference

Are you in need of all the expertise of a long term learning and professionalism without any financial commitment? The previous year was almost unpredictable and with 2017 being the same, most business owners are fretting about how they can face the varied challenges from both the political and economic unrest. Maybe, you have a temporary IT needs or you might be starting your new journey towards e-learning and want an efficient option to meet your specific requirements?

This year, it has become a practice to utilize the core in-house team and bring in highly trained support through the staff augmentation services as a solution to business seasonality, uncertainty and other troughs. This approach is adopted by various businesses previously to reduce their costs and have complete control on the staff expenditure. But staff augmentation services 2017 are predicted by various research and survey organizations to grow between approximately 30% in size.

At present, we are seeing outsourcing is making a powerful comeback and with legal protection becoming very stringent, the risk associated with it is also becoming negligible now a day. So, we are now left with highly sophisticated market where every penny counts. Now the most important question is how will your organization assesses if staff augmentation services are right for you or not?

In this blog, I will discuss with you, various points that are related to staff augmentation and that will help you to come to a firm conclusion.

The staff augmentation strategy:

While most business organizations have the expertise to handle various demands, some may not have explicit knowledge about a particular area. During such situations, companies are forced to augment their existing staff with talented professionals on per project basis.  With more and more business fluctuations and uncertainty, this kind of approach is highly on the increase.

The main driver of staff augmentation is to reduce cost and increase efficiency to match the correct people with the correct job. This adds great flexibility to business and helps to increase or decrease the staff levels based on the projects, instant market conditions and even the time of year.

Some tips on how to create your own strategy and identify the benefits that are both short and long term:

Getting the most out of your external staff:

A perfect strategy begins with understanding the internal skill base and then matching it with the company’s long term plans. This often helps to kick start the process of sourcing the right experts to support specific business goals. Staff augmentation service providers should have a dedicated HR team to see the deployment of their staff and how they can work together with other internal staff of other organizations. They should have the skills to support current and future needs and the external team can easily be managed by either the business itself or even by the agency. To maximize the efficiency of both the external and internal staff, the parties should work as a team and understand each other’s skills and limitations.

Success measurement:

Measurement of the performance is indicated by the KPIs and they ensure that the right person is placed in both internal as well as external and that the team is efficient. This is specifically very important for businesses that are facing frequent changes and fluctuations due to political and market conditions. The success of any project totally depends on a stable team and a motivated and stable augmented team is about four times more productive than the internal staff.

The performance of the external staff can be benchmarked against:

1. The employees’ attendance and specific skills
2. The contract’s statement of work
3. Weekly progress against the project deliverables and plans

Selecting the right supplier:

A successful team is based on trust and transparency and it is important to maintain a healthy relationship between a business and the supplier, which includes transparent pricing, contract and people. Choosing the perfect supplier goes much beyond transparency and it should have the right cultural fit. This is true especially when the outsourced staff are based abroad. They should have a proper communication means and the team should also collaborate well. Today, technology has given the facility to work in new ways regardless of the employee’s location. And the right staff augmentation agency should also offer immense flexibility in their contract and share knowledge across teams. However, any perfect strategy should always have to understand that it has to be a collaborative environment to motivate a specific outcome.

What a perfect staff augmentation strategy can give:

1. Introduce new business skills easily
2. Remove the continuous burden on skilled and vital IT resources
3. Keep the IT and people management, cost relatively low
4. Allow the management to plan in a better and innovative way for the business

Offering a new perspective:

With staff augmentation, you will gain a fresh and new perspective about how your things are going on. The efficiency and discipline that external professionals bring to your workplace, encourages your internal staff to improve their performance too. They also help to understand the project in a better manner by offering an objective outlook from a very different perspective.