Procurement Intelligence Unit

Procurement department are pioneering new recruitment strategies to generate cost savings for their companies. One of these is 'crowdsourcing', which allows staff to be re-employed on a contract basis. The in-direct costs of staff - like holidays, health costs, TOIL (time off in lieu), and even facilities costs - can be circumvented through restructuring HR's employment and recruitment patterns.

Comments from Tim Ringo, head of IBM Human Capital Management, sent tiny waves of panic through the waters of IT workers when he suggested that IBM's global workforce of 399,000 could be reduced to a rump of 100,000. The rest would be fired and re-hired on a project-only basis. This approach potentially yields huge savings for companies with high labour spend.

On the supply side, workers have gradually adopted 'e-lancing', a form of freelancing via the internet. Home working has morphed from a temporary necessity, where unforeseen events prevent workers from getting into work, to odd days out of the office, to full-scale virtual commuting.

Benefits abound. Working from home avoids colleagues' requests for lost staplers and the evil temptation of chocolate, and allows the more cerebral workers of a research company such as PIU to concentrate on heavy-duty research reports. Yet it also disconnects employees from the free transfer of knowledge and ideas at the office.

As, strange as it may seem, my colleagues are often the best research tool I have. The easy exchange of ideas over a cup of tea allows me to tap into their vast, pulsing brains, and to connect my research topics into areas that I may have never previously considered. This process is far faster than Google - and avoids the tedious sifting of irrelevant material.

But it may also require the occasional endurance of tangential voyages to colleagues' weekend adventures. At my previous employment, a colleague purveyed his knowledge at a high premium. In return for his advice, suffering staff were expected to withstand five-minute mini-lectures on his manly struggles with last night's Sudoku ... "I decided to throw caution to the wind and just put the five in the centre square!" 

Potentially, though, companies will accrue huge benefits from secondary costs for employees. Crowdsourcing also allows companies to save on the indirect costs of providing work facilities for staff: building costs, chairs, tables, stationery and endless supplies of instant coffee. And by slashing the administrative costs of their organisation, they can redirect resources to more productive areas, such as product development, research and sales expansion.

The loss of security is a frightening prospect for many people, but employees also make savings through e-lancing. Most employees would not miss the long commute to work, the air conditioner wars or the sometimes irritating habits of their colleagues (again, I'm talking of previous employment!) 

On a higher level, by freeing these resources from the economy, national economies may realise a significant boon to productivity and growth, in turn generating more economic opportunities for more e-lancers.