Is Staff Augmentation Right for Your Business?

Companies often need to hire and maintain a pool of top talents for specific projects. This necessity is usually resource-intensive and may result in significant long-term high costs. Managed services and traditional outsourcing procedures also come with higher risks. With staff augmentation, companies can quickly staff up, especially during critical projects.

The need to fill a skills gap arises for many reasons. Even if your team is talented, you might need an industry expert or a specialist. Alternatively, your employees may be overwhelmed with ongoing deadlines and need help.

The challenge of increasingly maintaining such a workforce in a cost-effective way is critical to the business’s win-win strategy. This is where the choice of staff augmentation vs. consulting services becomes interesting.

The staff augmentation model is a proven project management strategy. It’s highly effective when an expert is needed. It’s a flexible and usually more affordable method of growing your team without breaking the bank while boosting productivity.

Is staff augmentation right for your business and how can you implement it?

What does “staff augmentation” mean?

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The original concept emerged when company executives were hired to temporarily fill job roles because of illnesses and/or sabbaticals, amongst other reasons.

Staff augmentation is a project outsourcing technique involving the recruitment of qualified technical workers to fill jobs on the team on a need-based basis. It’s a helpful process for many companies as it combines the flexibility of project outsourcing services that may require hourly rates with the reliability of a full-time workforce.

 

Benefits of staff augmentation

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With the rise of the gig economy, changing work and company cultures present a major challenge to businesses. The IT industry alone has attrition rates of upwards of 40%. The staff augmentation model offers counteractive effects on the changes brought about by attrition rates.

Complete control

With the choice of staff augmentation vs. consulting, the evidence is clear, especially with team control. Staff augmentation provides you with complete control over project execution, enabling more efficient control of the outcome and project quality. While at it, dilute the various tasks within the project into task categories to efficiently hone in on urgent matters that could serve as the priority work for the incoming specialist/contract worker.

During crucial projects and busy periods, project managers often struggle with managing employee absences and holidays. Planning resources and organizing activities, tasks and meetings are often difficult, especially when absences are not clear. TimeTrack Leave Management provides business owners with the opportunity to approve absences while also helping with effective schedule planning.

Efficiency and high flexibility

Planning and implementing a recruitment drive demands huge resource investments and significant time consumption. If anything goes wrong, either at the shortlisting, interviewing or vetting stages, the invested resource and the entire process ends up null and avoid, after costing time, energy and money.

Consider a normal recruitment cycle:

• Aligning on job specifics
• Assigning a budget to the role
• Acquiring management sign-off for advertising
• Advertising on various platforms
• Sifting through applications and CVs
• Shortlisting candidates
• Conducting interviews
• Final interviews

One great benefit of staff augmentation is that it promotes lower resource use and time efficiency. You can easily cut through most of these steps and skip straight to finding and onboarding the right talent.

The staff augmentation model provides the easiest approach for companies to upsize or downsize. The flexibility that comes with the augmentation process enhances scalability, making it easy to strengthen the augmented team or augment the existing team with fresh resources as requirements demand.

The risk of taking an alternative route to layoffs, especially during difficult times, has serious implications for company morale. Augmented staff are often well-received and accommodated by existing ones, and this promotes greater flexibility and a healthy work culture.

Profitability and access to talent pool

Staff augmentation is cost-effective and flexible. It is more efficient with fewer recruitment and operational costs. The new employee only gets paid on a project basis, thus avoiding the need for Human Resources to create a whole new salary structure and package plus benefits, as they would for a full-time employee.

The team or company requiring fresh talent only needs to specify the talent gap and the staff augmentation firm will simply supply the needed talent. Companies can also easily access international talent pools, widening the reach and scope of your candidates.

Your company can use internal and external resources to identify skill gaps within existing teams and fill them with flexible staffing services. This allows you access to a network of specialists who’d arguably require little training and development, while being able to quickly hit the ground running.

How does the staff augmentation process work?

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As a project manager, assume your company has an internal CRM system which has issues that urgently need updating. The project will take three months to complete and you’ll need two specialists. From your existing team, you gauge that it’s not possible to complete the CRM project while managing all ongoing work. 

Considering staff augmentation vs. consulting, the former presents a better option in terms of flexibility, profitability and cost-effectiveness. 

• Identify skill gaps, the resources your team needs and the expertise or specialization that will complement the project team.
• Search for potential temporary staff whose skillset matches the job specs.
• Once you find the correct skill match, go through your company’s onboarding process. A successful onboarding process ensures that the temporary employees are perfectly integrated into the project at hand. Adopting the cooperation model to hire an augmented team will keep you ahead of the competition while helping you build dedicated team members.

Is staff augmentation necessary for your business?

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Below are few points on why you should consider staff augmentation for your business.

1. It reduces expenses on multiple levels since professionals are recruited on a project basis. Thus, projects pay for the personnel, thereby enhancing cost-effectiveness.
2. You permanently eliminate the costly recruitment procedures inherent in the traditional hiring process, but you now have access to a pool of dedicated teams.
3. Staff augmentation allows you to adjust the size of your personnel depending on demand. By leveraging the quality temporary staff, you create a dedicated team that provides ongoing support.
4. With staff augmentation, you hire people with specific skills, expand the local team and create a dedicated team that builds great company culture.

Adopting the cooperation model to hire an augmented team will keep you ahead of the competition while fostering dedicated team members. But this requires using a rapid planning method especially where you have limited time. This is often the hallmark of high-end achievers who spend no time on petty tasks but ramp up progress towards productivity.

Make staff augmentation work for you

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1. Staff augmentation suits one-time projects with no plan for continuation, such as an app or website development, a once-off event or conference and so on.
2. Carry out an in-depth analysis of needed skills to understand the talent gaps and identify particular skills shortages.
3. Determine required resources for the core business and begin the process to bridge the skills gap.

Business owners face even greater difficulty with planning, especially where employees work in shifts. This should no longer be the case with TimeTrack Shift Planning, which guarantees flexible shift creation according to location, work area and talents.

Conclusion

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Make the most of the increasingly globalized corporate world and all its benefits. Staff augmentation methods can help you quickly upskill your business to manage ad-hoc projects.

Try TimeTrack for a free and deeper understanding of how automated processes can significantly improve your core business focus.