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Managing a company’s workforce is not getting any easier.

Back when employees primarily worked from their office cubicles, it was relatively easy to keep track of workers and ensure that they were performing properly. But the advent of mobility has added extra challenges to the task of workforce management, and that’s the easy part; even more complicating than a mobile workforce is the rise of contingent labor within a company.

Contingent labor is labor that’s not on payroll, basically. This can be freelance or contract-based workers.

As businesses have needed to become more adaptable and flexible to stay competitive, the role of contingent labor has increased. When employees are on staff, it is hard to add or remove labor as projects change and different skill sets are needed; contingent labor is scalable and flexible enough to adapt to current needs, in that different workers can be employed depending on the skills required.

Contingent labor also is cost-effective, partially because it gets around the benefits question and partially because of that scalability; businesses only need to pay for what they use when it comes to contingent labor.

Optimizing contingent labor can be tricky, however; the job of workforce management is made harder when workers come and go more often. This is the downside of contingent labor.

The solution for many businesses starts with more and better metrics, which lets businesses keep better tabs on these temporary workers and spot trends.

Also key to managing contingent workers is robust workforce management software that can keep track of this data and put it into a form that is easy to digest and act upon.

Businesses find that workforce management software optimizes their human resource situations, and this is all the more the case when it comes to the more challenging contingent workforce situation.

As the need for flexibility and adaptability grows, use of contingent labor will grow. So will the use of workforce management software to optimize these workers and ensure they are performing at their best.