What does staff augmentation mean? Staff augmentation generally refers to hiring external manpower on a temporary, part-time or full-time contract basis, to complement the skills of your own in-house staff. Companies partner with the supplying agency to get access to a short term workforce for a specified duration. This type of recruitment principle is most popular in fields like engineering or IT, because of the innumerable projects and the need for highly specialized manpower for big projects.
Who Uses Staff Augmentation?
When a company has a huge project looming ahead, the last thing they need is to worry about recruiting and hiring the right team for the job. Choosing staff augmentation allows a company to get the right kind of specialized help they need on a per project basis, thus making it easier to focus on their business objectives. Moreover, at times companies can be short of resources to finish a given project in time. In such situations, hiring permanent employees may get the task done, but you’ll end up paying them all year round without assigning them any further tasks. Thus, staff augmentation comes in handy.
What Does Staff Augmentation Mean?
Advantages of Staff Augmentation
-Control; Staff augmentation gives you control over your projects and you can perform regular monitoring to ensure the final product will be exactly how you had planned it.
-Fill specialized roles; In certain cases, highly specialized talents might be needed for certain projects, but not necessarily for any more business needs. Staff augmentation provides you with a way to shop for just that specific skill set.
-Cost effective; With staff augmentation you simply pay for the work only when you need it and only for the specific skills. This in turn saves on wages both in the short term and long term since you will only have to pay for the time worked. You will never have to worry about downtime or trying to find tasks for full time employees to do when there’s no work available. Moreover, there are less overhead costs like taxes, bonuses, health insurance and other benefits of in house employees.
-New perspective/outlook; Bringing in a neutral, third party member into your organization allows you to get a new perspective and fresh outlook on things. As an outsider, the new short term member is less likely to engage in office politics and will be in a perfect position to offer unbiased and objective feedback.
-Saves time; The ability to hire short term workers for the certain projects can help you save time because the said workers are usually hired much faster compared to full time employees.
-Flexibility; Staff augmentation allows a company to quickly adapt. When a company expands in-office workforce with the hired talent, deadlines of the crucial projects can be shifted to earlier dates. This flexibility enables organizations to respond faster to the market trends and changes.
Cons
-Reliance on the in-house processes; In case there is a problem with the in-house processes, the staff augmentation resources will also be negatively affected same as the internal employees.
-Management overhead; Additional resources via staff augmentation will require an increase in management overhead because of the increased need to supervise the increased number of short term staff.
-Can be training intensive; At times there might still be training involved in bringing outside manpower up to speed with the company processes, domain information and other tools.
Conclusion
What does staff augmentation mean? It’s getting a skilled team of specialists to work in tangent with the in house staff. By utilizing staff augmentation, a company can leverage the capabilities of skilled professionals in a cost effective way to meet the business demands efficiently without any negative impact to their internal staff or reputation.
