Why and how to implement cross-staffing in 2023?

While the global Covid-19 pandemic has changed the way we behave in society, it has also had a brutal impact on the organization of work in companies. The massive use of teleworking has shown that we can go beyond a business organization built according to a geographical logic (departments, offices, branches).

With projects carried out mainly (and increasingly) remotely, the Nantes office must be able, for example, to position an employee from the Toulouse office on one of its projects rather than refusing it for lack of resources, which would degrade the company's performance: It's the rise of cross-staffing.

All the same, this involves a staffing process and a sharp organization: the knowledge of availability collaborators at the macro level (and no longer only by departments or offices), a dynamic skills mapping shared across the company, complete and up to date, as well as a clear validation process and established to manage requests for Staffing.

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Here's how to set up a smooth and effective cross-staffing system:

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STEP 1: Centralize all information concerning current projects and the availability of employees at the macro level of the company

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To be able to practice cross-staffing in a company, the first step is to pool all resources, all departments combined. Indeed, directors no longer capitalize only on the skills of the employees in their department but on all those of the company. To succeed in this first step, two actions to be implemented:

🔄 Centralize on a Staffing software all the information concerning the projects and the teams. Abandon Excel files used locally, which prevent good data transmission and global visibility of the activity.

🔀 Integrate the staffing software perfectly with your existing tools (SIRH, CRM, ERP,...) to avoid double entry, keep information up to date in real time and have a vision of the availability of all company resources at all levels.

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STEP 2: Know all the skills that are available in the company

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If a department director could hitherto pride himself on knowing all the skills of his employees, he is completely outdated when the sharing of resources becomes widespread and that the number of employees concerned is exploding. Three solutions to this problem:

📄 Create and maintain a dynamic map of skills for all teams. This mapping makes it possible to have visibility on all the skills available within the company at a given moment. It must be exhaustive and kept up to date thanks to regular feedback: during or after each project and during annual evaluations.

💭 Give employees the opportunity to fill in the skills they have acquired and those they wish to develop in order to identify the most motivated and relevant profiles for a project.

💻 Benefit from a search engine to find out if a specific skill is available in the company and to be able to easily and quickly find the associated profile before using external service providers.