The Covid-19 pandemic has hit all aspects of our life like a giant wave aiming to destroy everything and creating a new normal for us. While we adjust to this new normal personally, we are also left with numerous aspects of our business lives which need to be transformed to match the new reality. One such aspect is staff augmentation and outsourcing. 

While the pandemic hasn’t been generous to most industries, it has affected the staff augmentation market rather positively. Staff augmentation’s market size grew up from USD 92.5 Billion in 2019 to USD 132.9 Billion after the pandemic struck! Given that the worldwide pandemic mainstreamed the work from home culture, the growth in usage of staff augmentation was rather inevitable. 

The process of staff augmentation must be carried out properly by undertaking the following, well-thought steps:

  1. Identifying business needs precisely by establishing detailed goals of your business plan and figuring out the amount of resources you need to fulfill them. 
  2. Interviewing and selecting people with the set of skills that match your requirements.
  3. Integrating your newly selected staff with your existing employees to achieve smooth workflow and ensuring that all the newcomers are well informed about your way of working. 
  4. Giving regular feedback and inputs to the augmented staff so that there are no loopholes in the system and all work is up to date.

Even though it was still a well-known trend in the pre-pandemic era, successfully leveraging staff augmentation amid the pandemic requires a modified set of considerations. Let’s discuss them.

1. Avoid proximity of employees

The first and foremost factor you have to consider while augmenting staff during the coronavirus pandemic is the proximity of your employees. The circumstances are such that all staff members will be reluctant to work in close quarters. 

A highly preferable option is to adopt work from home practices and let your in-house employees as well as augmented staff work from remote locations. Adopting the right work from home practices can help you save more time and money while achieving enhanced productivity and not worrying about the proximity of your employees.

2. Wisely use your limited space

If you are thinking about beginning on-site work, you have to take proper social distancing measures to ensure that your staff feels safe. These measures include:

  • Making significant changes to your workplace interiors
  • Don’t bring staff members on-site until it is absolutely imperative
  • Maintaining proper distance between each work desk
  • Ensuring that your employees wear masks at all times
  • Proper sanitization of the workplace at the end of every work day

All these measures may seem general but are extremely important to make your staff feel safe while working. As you are increasing the size of your team with staff augmentation, incorporating more number of people in the same limited space must be done with proper safety measures.

3. Invest in effective onboarding practices

Onboarding your augmented staff amid the pandemic can be challenging. However, there are several practices you can do to ensure that they receive proper orientation, such as investing your time and effort in formulating and conducting sessions to ensure that your augmented staff is introduced to your in-house team properly and all guidelines are explained to them effectively.

4. Management tools

Management of augmented staff in remote settings can be made easier by leveraging remote working management tools to create user-friendly virtual work spaces for your employees. This will help them to collaborate effectively as well as help you to manage them more efficiently. Some examples are JIRA, Confluence, Trello, Microsoft Teams and Slack.   

6. Give clear guidelines on remote working

Just like you, this is the first time everyone is dealing with the sudden shift in work patterns. Hence, before augmenting staff members, you must set up proper guidelines that must be followed to maintain work standards and achieve smooth workflow. By giving clear guidelines to your augmented staff, managing them will become easier for you. 

The coronavirus pandemic has drastically transformed the way businesses function across the globe. In such uncertain times, staff augmentation tends to be a better option for many companies as compared to hiring full-time employees. It allows organizations to speed up their work by increasing their team size temporarily. Also, it saves up a lot of costs and time that would have otherwise been spent in training the newly hired employees. 

Though it may seem like a foreign concept initially, you will gradually realize that the flexibility offered by adopting staff augmentation is very appealing. But staff augmentation amid the pandemic brings its own set of troubles. However, they can be handled efficiently as you can ensure successful staff augmentation if you take all appropriate steps and measures to tackle the situation effectively.