Dawn O’Bryan-Lamb has been in the contingent labor space for 25 years in almost every seat imaginable, including supplier, buyer and onsite program management. Today, as the supplemental workforce program manager, she resides in the talent acquisition division of HR, supervising the MSP, which provides staff augmentation resources under a traditional staffing program.

She joined Southern California Edison, or SCE, three years ago, overseeing the first program maturity exercise and successfully improving the program in all areas. Pleased as she is with that accomplishment, she prides herself on being the subject-matter expert for non-employee strategies, issues and policies. “I don’t like to be stuck in a rut, so I love that this role is constantly changing!” she says. “You have to continually adapt and learn and stretch yourself.”

Covid-19 brought about major changes in SCE’s supplemental workforce program. “Prior to the pandemic, there was very little remote work. It was a huge change to let some people work from home once a week,” O’Bryan-Lamb recalls. “But Covid-19 is a total turnaround. Everyone is working remotely, except essential workers.”

She and her team worked quickly to determine logistics for widespread remote work. Now she foresees remote work to be an expectation of contractors in the future. “Good talent will want remote flexibility,” she says. “We’ve got the technology that makes remote work almost indistinguishable from coming into the office. Why not continue?”