Why should we care about external workers? Exploring the conceptual foundations of total workforce management

The growing use of external skilled workers (or Independent Professionals) by modern organizations raises many unsolved questions in HRM. Who is responsible for managing their careers? What kind of actions can be developed to foster their engagement in lieu of pure transactional contracts? What kind of relations can be organized between client organizations and the third-party actors likely to intervene? In an attempt to answer such questions, the paper explores the conceptual foundations of the new rhetoric on ‘total workforce management’, an emerging concept in the managerial literature, and provides a research agenda on this topic.
The proposed research agenda is based on an extensive literature review on the management of external skilled workers. The available empirical evidence however remains scattered: our paper aims at providing an integrated analytical framework around this topic.
Three main dimensions are distinguished through which total workforce management may be deployed. For each of them, new partnerships can be developed between HR managers and external and/or internal stakeholders in order to respond to the challenges of managing external skilled workers. Such partnerships offer unexpected learning opportunities to the HR function.
In practical terms, the pros and cons of a blended management of workers are discussed and concrete actions are suggested to support the engagement of external skilled workers in the perspective of a ‘high road’ HRM strategy.
Thanks to its original analytical framework, the paper goes far beyond the current rhetoric developed by consultants and HR technology vendors around this topic.