A dangerous visibility gap

Organizations are increasingly engaging an agile mix of employees, including an on-demand workforce of contingent staff, independent contractors, consultants, and freelancers with unique skills and flexibility.

While expanded use of the wide variety of contingent resources provides greater flexibility, research shows that, on average, only 38% of non-employee labor is accounted for in formal budgeting, planning, and financial forecasting, according to The State of Contingent Workforce Management 202, Ardent Partners. In fact, many organizations lack a single repository for tracking and managing non-employee labor.

In addition to limiting an organization’s ability to make comprehensive decisions about its workforce, these untracked workers can create serious security and regulatory compliance issues.

Untracked workers create control and continuity issues

When the global pandemic struck in 2020, business continuity planning took center stage. In just a matter of days, contingent workforce program owners needed to identify and communicate with each and every person working for them, including contingent workers.

That was just the beginning. With the proliferation of remote work – for both employees and contingent workers – visibility became an even greater challenge. Now, more than ever, businesses need to know where workers are located, what projects they are working on, and what access they have to company equipment, networks, and data. They need to know who is working on mission-critical projects, how to contact them, and how to monitor their progress.

Reducing security and compliance risks

In today’s hyper-competitive commercial environment, security is a vital concern for every kind of business. Safeguarding physical property, intellectual property, personal information, financial information, and the company’s reputation must be a crucial part of every business strategy.

Business leaders must ask themselves: What would be the impact on our business if we failed to protect these vital assets? How would we respond to our customers and our shareholders?

While outsourced service workers — facility managers, security guards, helpdesk personnel, food service workers, and others — have become an increasingly prominent part of the business landscape, they are not always considered with the rest of the non-employee workforce, and are therefore, overlooked. This poses both security and compliance risks.

Audit findings of a Fortune 500 financial services company revealed that several non-employee service workers maintained security badges and network access for more than 10 years after their engagement ended.

A non-employee worker at a global IT firm walked out of the building with a computer containing health records, insurance data, and social security information.

In another instance, a contractor was given access to competitive bids, which were then passed to the worker’s supplier to help them win the next phase of bidding. With no centralized solution in place, the non-employee workers’ access was never tracked or classified.

Without the proper checks and balances, organizations may be letting the wrong people into their buildings and data systems, even years after their assignment ends.

Compliance tracking is essential

In addition to increased physical and data security risks, the growing presence of non-employee workers is also exposing companies to increased risks of:

• Poor policy adherence: Companies often have specific requirements regarding onboarding, training, orientation, security, and other procedures. These policies are designed to protect your organization by ensuring everyone follows the same rules and regulations. However, for consistency, the application of these policies to contingent resources must be tracked and verified.

The same holds true for offboarding activities. When a contract ends, companies must make sure their workers’ access ends as well. Can they track whether security badges have been physically collected? Do they record all offboarding activities to ensure compliance? The wrong answer may leave the company vulnerable to theft, property damage, or worse.

• Regulatory non-compliance: Compliance burdens imposed by government regulations apply differently from industry to industry, sector to sector, and locality. This makes it particularly important for companies to identify and properly classify all non-employee workers performing services.

Failure to do so could result in time-consuming compliance reporting and, potentially, misclassification errors, financial penalties, and damage to the company’s reputation

Identity management for physical and cyber security

“Identity management” presents both a challenge and an opportunity for improving organizational security. Contractors, consultants, temporary workers, and outsourced services workers all have various degrees of access to enterprise systems, sensitive data and information, business facilities, and hardware. It is critical to track and manage these resources to prevent the loss of physical or intellectual property or sensitive information (such as personal or financial information).

According to Ardent Partners’ research, although nearly 70% of enterprises have visibility into data systems access by statement of work (SOW)-based service workers and contract talent, only 44% have systems in place to ensure that temporary IDs, usernames, and passwords to enterprise systems are deactivated during offboarding to mitigate the risk of losing intellectual property or sensitive financial information. Even fewer enterprises have real-time visibility into access by other classifications of non-employee workers, such as those providing outsourced services.

Cost of overlooking non-employees

Non-employee workers are overlooked for many reasons. Some business units resist contingent workforce program adoption or changes in their sourcing process. Or they lack a single repository for managing and tracking non-employee workers.

While these may seem reasonable excuses for not tracking non-employees, the risks to which they expose their organizations make them unacceptable in today’s business environment.

Fortunately, there’s a streamlined way to track these non-employees, so you have full visibility into your contingent workforce.

Change can be seamless

Gaining visibility into non-employee resources can be done without disrupting an organization’s day-to-day operations. Beeline Resource Tracking can be implemented as a standalone solution or as an expansion of your existing Beeline solutions, so that the entire non-employee workforce is tracked and managed within a single system. Either way, the organization gains visibility and compliance of previously untracked workers quickly and with minimal change management required.

When implemented as a standalone solution, Resource Tracking can be a great first step toward managing a company’s entire extended workforce. As the organization’s needs change, Beeline’s technology can be scaled to meet the specific needs of the organization’s defined contingent workforce management strategy.

Conclusion

If you have non-employee workers in your organization or are thinking about adding them for the strategic flexibility they can deliver, you should consider the visibility offered by Beeline Resource Tracking. By mitigating the security and compliance risk, you can help your company gain the sustainable competitive advantage that a well-managed contingent workforce can provide.