Contingent Workforce Audit
As we navigate the uncertainty ahead, it is more important than ever to have some flexibility in your workforce. You may be considering scaling back your permanent workforce in response to a reduced pipeline of work and to cut expenditure. But what happens if you need to increase capacity quickly in the future, or urgently bring in new skills to cope with a change of direction? Contingent workers are a great way to bring that flexibility into your workforce, but having the right combination and type of workers is key to keeping the cost to a minimum.
Our Contingent Workforce Audit has three main components – use them independently or combined to ensure that you get the most out of your flexible workforce.
Step 1
Discovery
Do you know how many contingent workers you have in your business? How much are they costing you? How long have they been there? So many organisations have very little visibility and control over their contractor population, and are unable to confidently answer these questions.
Our Discovery process will uncover any contingent workers in your business in the form of a report detailing
● Who they are?
● What role they are carrying out?
● Who supplied them?
● What they are being paid?
● How long they have been working for you?
● Whether they are compliant (and if not, an action plan to ensure compliance)?
Step 2
Contingent Workforce Optimisation
Are you using contractors in the most cost-effective and efficient way?
Our contingent workforce optimisation plan assesses whether you are engaging your contingent workforce in the most beneficial way. We look at whether there is a more cost effective way of engaging those workers, with a focus on IR35 compliance.
- Could their activities be carried out by permanent workers?
- Could your permanent staff be cross-trained to be able to do that work?
- Could the work be done as an outcome-based project rather than a day rate contract?
- Could you use Employed Consultants instead to help reduce cost?
We review each role that is being carried out by a contractor to establish if there is a better and/or less expensive way of providing that resource. We then create a plan for you to make those changes happen, being mindful that business continuity and delivery must remain stable.
Step 3
Future-proofing your Contingent Workforce
How do you ensure that you continue to get it right?
The nature of a flexible workforce means that it is constantly changing – often on a daily or weekly basis. If you aren’t set up correctly as a business to record, monitor and govern the use of contractors, you will continue to find yourself back at square one, with a non-compliant and costly workforce.
● We review any existing systems that you have in place, and advise how to adapt them to accommodate contingent worker data, or recommend new tools to help you manage the information. If additional technology is required, we can help you decide upon the best system for your business.
● We help you to produce well documented policies and processes for your finance, recruitment and procurement departments in order to maintain control of who is hired into the business in future.
● Benchmarking of market rates helps to ensure that you continue to get value for money across your contractor population. We will help you to build a skills matrix that identifies the best type of contingent resource for each skill set, and provide you with a rate card for those skills.
● Often, new processes require communication and training programmes in order to ensure that they are properly adhered to – this can be part of the package that we deliver.
● A central team should be responsible for compliance, and we can advise what measures need to be implemented covering on-boarding, insurance and IR35.
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