In today's world, it is not only difficult to find and hire a competent employee but also to retain them. This is because of the increasing competition and the changing technologies.
The need for staff augmentation has increased due to the increasing business growth and the need for more specialized skills. The use of technology in business has resulted in a rise in demand for staff augmentation services. This has resulted in more organizations hiring professionals with special skills, who are known as experts. Staff augmentation helps organizations to meet their business needs by providing them with additional manpower or resources.
But there are challenges involved with staff augmentation that can make it more complex than it seems at first glance. In this article, we will be taking a deep dive into the challenges that revolve around Staff Augmentation.
What is Staff Augmentation?
Staff Augmentation services involve outsourcing some or all of the innovation work of your organization. It is an effective way to increase productivity and reduce costs, especially in industries where labor costs are high. It can also help companies retain top-tier talent by providing them with more opportunities for advancement.
Using staff augmentation can quickly and inexpensively increase the size of your team. The staff augmentation provider will hire, train, and manage your new team members, saving you from the hassles of recruitment and on-boarding.
Staff augmentation became one of the most effective ways for improving time-to-market, cutting costs, and embracing innovation.
Since the Covid era, the organizations are finding it hard to deal with the pandemic mode, so remote working has become quite prominent these days. In order to survive the pandemic, many enterprises are now moving to this model. So, many companies are now considering hiring IT workforce in outsourcing firms. Those who have never used staff augmentation services earlier are now planning to do so .
Let's take a quick look at the challenges faced with Staff Augmentation and it’s solutions.
1. Find The Right Expert
The IT sector is suffering from a serious shortage of skilled workers. This has made it increasingly difficult for companies to find and recruit IT specialists. In 2020, 69% of business leaders felt that their organizations were facing a digital skills gap. The IT talent shortage has been a major reason why many companies have turned to staff augmentation. The challenge for companies that use staff augmentation is finding and hiring the right staffing agency.
Best Solution
To find a well-trusted outsourcing agency that meet your manpower requirements. With a deep understanding of both your business and workforce needs, an outsourcing partner that understands both the technical and business aspects of such projects is a good fit for your organization. Partnering with an outsourcing company also offloads you from the burden of compliance and security issues. The service provider should have all the security and infrastructure certifications in place, such as ISO, PCI, or HIPAA, to maximize security.
2. Communication & Management
Effective communication is an essential component of any new practice to ensure that it will succeed within an organization. Keep in mind that Staff Augmentation with remote teams often involves working with offshore staff, so it's important to communicate well because the implications of poor communication can be quite drastic.
However, developing a clear communication plan should be prioritized when hiring staff augmentation. A solid communication strategy should include:
*Using collaboration tools, such as Zoom , MS Teams ,Hangouts , JIRA, slack, git-hub, etc..
*Perform frequent reviews
*Conduct weekly socialization
*Using Agile methodologies, such as Scrum, etc.
3. Legal Issues
If you do not sign a contract with your staff augmentation partner, you may end up with low quality workers, increased costs to your organization, you risk not having full transparency in your relationship with your outsourcing partner. This formality makes a poorly executed contract for your business. This also may compromise the security standard of your company.
When collaborating with a staff augmentation partner, an organization can enter into one of the three different types of contracts: a long-term dedicated team, short-term projects or fixed-price projects.
Regardless of the type of contract, an organization must ensure that some key points are clearly specified in the contract, such as:
* Penalties of inaction
* Talent of the best quality is assured
* The security policy have been followed
* Respect deadlines from clients or collaborators
* Clear terms about having detailed billing information
4. Scalability
Hiring additional IT specialists can be a challenging task. If you are planning on setting up a development team, you should take into account how long it usually takes for a vendor to scale up the team. You should keep in mind that even in a country with a vast pool of talent, it can still take some time to find the right people. This is especially true if you are looking for experts in such niche fields as data science, AI, or specific programming languages, such as Java, Go, or Python.
Here are some things you need to determine before partnering with the outsourcing company:
* Find out what is the average employee turnover rate. According to some studies,it should be 10-15%
* Find out the number of recruitment specialists a company has
* Find out how many IT experts they have in their talent pool
* Make sure they have a strong employer brand
* Negotiate a reasonable notice period before scaling up or down the team
5. Project Knowledge Transfer
While using staffing augmentation, companies often run the risk of putting all of their eggs in one basket. That's because, although employees do add value through the unmatched wealth of experience, they can also be the sources of a lot of fragmented, incoherent and unorganized knowledge.
So you need to make sure that effective knowledge transfer is happening in your organization. This ensures that the set up is efficient and the risks of operational and business process inefficiencies are minimal.
Organizations can make sure employees have all the information by:
* Creating a well-thought-out and systematic plan for transferring
* Defining which information is relevant and needs to be transferred at particular
* Ensuring that all technical documents are complete and accurate
* Assigning different tasks to different people at various stages of knowledge
* Holding regular Q&A sessions
Conclusion
Staff augmentation provides multiple benefits to businesses that can use it to augment their skilled workforce during peak times or for special projects or additional bandwidth. It provides flexibility, scalability, and boosts collaboration and productivity. While staff augmentation provides obvious benefits, it also presents some challenges. It is important to understand these challenges so that you can successfully implement staff augmentation for your business.
TECHVED is a premier staff augmentation service provider in the IT industry. Our team of experts is always on hand to provide cutting-edge solutions for businesses of all sizes, including start ups, multinational corporations, and SMEs.
We have been implementing and leveraging latest technologies, software platforms and tools to offer digital solutions to businesses of all sizes for 2 decades. We specialize in providing top talent and resources that seamlessly integrate with your existing systems. Get skilled professionals and experts for your business.