If your organisation uses temps and contractors, AWR has made life more risky since January 2012. Are your recruitment practices still up to the job?

Non-permanent staff help employers to keep headcount down and stay agile. But many are ill-equipped to deal with the explosion of compliance demands, risking massive fines or even closure. Smarter strategies are required. A little self-examination could help. Here are three key questions to see whether you’re in good shape or a disaster waiting to happen.

1. Do we rely on contractors to tell us when their certifications expire and renew?

If you do, you’re at risk of ‘double exposure’. First there’s a massive dependency on individual contract staff to maintain and provide the right information. Secondly, you need the people and systems to stay on top it all, without fail.

And it’s a multi-headed serpent. For example, in the medical and healthcare sector, for each temporary worker employers usually need:

• An appropriate qualification certificate: degree or diploma
• An annually renewed registration certificate (eg GMC, HPC, NMC or GPh)
• Website checks for outstanding hearings, fitness to work issues etc
• Verification of up to 13 annually repeated, mandatory training topics.

Other sectors will have their own challenges – whether in food and entertainment, construction or cleaning services. The energy industry, for instance, is awash with cards and certifications that expire at 1-year, 3-year or 5-year intervals.

How do you cope? The answer lies in the robustness of your processes. They need to be rigorous, resilient and scalable – so that you can be confident you’ve got the control you need.

2. Can we easily produce a complete audit trail of communications with any given contractor on demand?

If you can’t, your approach may no longer adequate for today’s compliance challenges. Because if you’re on the receiving end of an alleged breach, you could burn days of manager-hours digging up the data – costing a fortune and disrupting operations.

A typical set-up will run on Excel, warm bodies and goodwill. Most records are a mix of paper, email and spreadsheets distributed across HR and line management. There’s no scope for forward planning or scalability. Users run front-office system reports to highlight deficiencies – and then scurry around chasing the exceptions manually. Recognise this? If not, you may be among the 80% who simply swan along in ignorance and hope.

A better solution involves mastering the processes, then using technology to automate record-keeping and prevent the need for scurrying around in the first place – delivering a massive rebate in reduced admin.

3. Do we know for certain that our temporary worker agencies adhere to the same standards we set ourselves?

Many HR teams get involved in on-boarding and induction and aren’t engaged in the initial placement . So, there’s potential exposure to weak standards of practice by the agency, the hiring manager or both.

Take the AWR requirements for information on Day One Rights and other employment conditions. Some agencies include indemnities in their T&C’s that try to pass off compliance responsibilities to other parties. But while derogation may be a legally grey area, it’s prudent to assume that EVERYBODY is liable for a breach. The onus is on companies to proactively communicate changes to employment terms, conditions and remuneration.

Is it really sustainable to rely on memory, best efforts and the diligence of the agency? Probably not. Can HR teams shoulder the burden alone? Almost certainly, no.

But it should be possible to spread the load between the different parties by structuring communications differently – shifting the burden of effort more onto those who need to yield information. And it can be automated, further reducing the overall effort required to successfully complete a process.

The swelling tide and ever-shifting sands of compliance mean even the finest admin teams and time-honoured routines cannot keep up. Better perhaps to learn from the CRM field, where the business of blending trust-based communications with hard commercial documentation is already battle-hardened. Low-cost process management tools like this may offer the kind of auditable, scalable capability needed to be fully fit to meet the new compliance challenge.