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Contract Management and Outsourcing Services During Quarantine

Contract Management and Outsourcing Services During Quarantine

Every business out there needs to deal with a wide variety of responsibilities. Most of them are necessary to engage in successful business practices which make sure that the company itself is fulfilling its goals and expectations.

Among them, we can agree that the way staffing is managed is pretty important. Most of the time companies manage to be successful thanks to having talented employees who can deal with their responsibilities efficiently, at times doing more than they should just to make sure that they remain at the top, improving the company’s performance in the process while surpassing its previous limitations and results.

With that said, hiring the right employees can be considered a challenge just because of the great number of factors capable of influencing this process, even more during these hard times. For that reason, many businesses have started to rely on contract management processes, which as showcased over https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contract_management, are a form of business management that is meant to focus on this specific aspect of businesses.

There are also outsourcing services that can provide a lot of help during these processes, but they can be a lot different from more regular forms of contract management, even causing some problems at times. 

We will cover both aspects of businesses, but let’s first talk about how COVID influences today’s society, and more specifically, companies. 

How Covid Changed Things

Because of COVID-19, the world has changed heavily during the last and current year. Businesses were greatly affected by these changes to the point of needing to engage in new practices to sustain themselves.

This is because the COVID-19 virus is a highly contagious and fatal infectious disease, so new biological safety countermeasures were necessary, thus, various aspects of society underwent severe changes. Of course, these necessary changes also splashed businesses, stores, and companies.

A good example of this is how social meetings were pretty much forbidden during the early months of this pandemic crisis, and social distance was applied all around the world. This naturally affected a lot of companies and businesses all around the world, and a lot of people lost their jobs because of it. 

This brought the introduction of the home-office working method, which although was practiced before the lockdown, now is more common than ever, to the point of becoming a very popular business practice that has greatly improved the lives of many employees. This was a necessary methodology for a lot of companies out there, but it has now become a rule which might remain even after COVID-19 is dealt with.

The Way Companies Hire Their Staff

Contract Management and Outsourcing Services During Quarantine

Now, another aspect that changed quite a lot is the way businesses manage their hiring processes. The reason is simple: because of the lockdown, not a lot of people have the freedom to leave their homes. 

And although things have improved and there’s more freedom right now compared to last year, a lot of people are just not comfortable with the idea of leaving their homes, especially those who have lost family members and friends because of COVID. 

Needless to say, this required companies to change their ways. Online applications have been the rule for quite some time, but during the lockdown, it is pretty much the only way of reaching out to companies. Meetings are now handled using software like Zoom, Skype, and Slack. New methods of testing the skills of the potential employees are also applied. 

Overall, things have changed quite a bit, some think for the better while others think for the worse. And although I do believe that there are way too many advantages to these new changes in comparison to the disadvantages, there’s a con that I believe has brought a lot of troubles regarding employment processes: contracts, misunderstandings and of course, a lack of adequate communication.

Outsourcing and Miscommunication

Because a lot of companies are not used to the way things are being handled right now, misunderstandings and miscommunications are bound to happen. This can affect those new employees entering a company, just because they are not given what they were initially promised. Not only that but partnerships and other types of associations are also affected.

On a lot of occasions, this can reduce the reputation of the company because of poorly managed practices, and for brands and businesses, reputation is a very important aspect of their management. Loss of profit can also be a result of poor contract management.

Just last month one of my closest friends underwent a hiring process with a company and was promised a very high salary just to be told that the specific contract he signed was not the one he should have initially been offered. Things became heavily complicated after that, and although both parties reached an agreement, it was a very uncomfortable experience.

This is mostly happening because of something known as outsourcing which is a practice employed by companies in which they rely on external service providers so they handle some aspects of their internal processes, and one very popular form of outsourcing is staffing outsource practices. 

Outsourcing definitely has its merits, reducing the costs of some of the processes of a company while also improving its ability to focus on specific aspects of its management, but one of its disadvantages is this problem. 

Contract Management Services 

That is why a lot of companies rely on contract management, which can be described as the process in which a company organizes and records all contracts performed with employees, customers, vendors, and partners. 

Contract management involves the process in which a company negotiates the terms of a contract to make sure that both parties reach a satisfactory outcome. It documents these agreements, any changes performed to it, and the process before and after its implementation.

This is done not only to make sure that all procedures are followed properly, but also, to efficiently manage contracts during their creation, negotiation, and execution for the sake of reducing the likelihood of possible risks, while also having access to valuable information that could help during decision-making processes. That is why contract management could enter the category of accounting since it is a form of document-recording process.

With that said, new methodologies of contract management have been introduced in recent days and some contract management services and software are now available in the market. 

These services and programs are meant to be there for the sake of improving the way contracts are handled in many different aspects, from the way negotiations are made to the way contracts are registered, used, and organized.

This, of course, greatly reduces disorganization, improves tracking, facilitates regulatory legal procedures, and improves the overall security in which said contracts are handled. However, it might indeed need some form of training to be properly used, but they tend to be pretty straightforward so they are easy to deal with.