The pandemic revealed weaknesses in the global supply chain with the power to halt the flow of business and disrupt our daily lives. Companies across all industries pivoted into new ways to mitigate risk and define a new business-as-usual. For some companies (as many as 64% of North American manufacturers, according to one study), reshoring operations was their ticket to reduce dependency on global partners, but unprecedented skilled talent shortage, record industry-wide turnover, and a competitive talent market unlike any other stand in their way.
For manufacturers, it’s particularly challenging. Staffing Industry Analysts (SIA)’s employer survey examined the talent shortage’s current impact and future outlook for manufacturers:
As the industry continues to define new norms in our post-pandemic lives, it’s clear that companies must re-evaluate their approach to talent acquisition and retention to help build a more reliable workforce. Higher pay has been the go-to strategy of most employers, but what happens when it’s no longer profitable to do so? And how are employers creating loyalty and deepening relationships with their workers to get them to stay?
Savvy companies are seeking opportunities to leverage strategic partners to solve for labor shortage, retention, and wage inflation challenges while maintaining high production standards. Here’s why.
As the saying goes, “Spend more time working on your business and less time working in it.” Business process outsourcing (BPO) allows companies to hand off project management, talent attraction, and talent retention practices to a single staffing solution, who bares the responsibility for that team, boosting efficiency, productivity, and profitability. By leveraging a BPO partnership for high turnover, or hard-to-fill roles, operations see improved flexibility and bandwidth for their in-house team. Operationally, that can mean added internal focus on core competencies, new innovations, improving competitive advantages, and the bandwidth to deepen company-employee relationships to support worker retention. BPO agreements allow companies to react more nimbly to changing market dynamics and often see an improvement in service quality.
In its 2020 Global Outsourcing Survey, Deloitte found that 70% of companies who incorporate BPO into their labor strategies did so for cost savings. With the cost of replacing an hourly employee hovering around $5,000 (Source: SHRM), the time and money required to perpetually attract, interview, hire, and onboard new employees adds up quickly. Trusting an experienced BPO partner who is also a leading staffing solution – like Kelly – provides companies reliable access to engaged, experienced workers for one flat fee.
As the cost of doing business continues to rise, BPO becomes an essential tool in supporting organizations’ strategic and financial goals. When expenses and management of talent attraction, hiring, retention, engagement, and pay are outsourced and fully handled by a BPO partner, companies can pass on worry and responsibility of keeping up with wages while reducing labor costs and employee turnover.
With talent and supply chains in constant flux, a business process outsourcing (BPO) agreement might just be your ticket to stability in a not-so-stable world. Along with engaged, focused workers, BPO agreements deliver added benefits, including talent acquisition cost savings, reduced staff turnover, improved efficiency, and so much more.