Blended Workforce

The practical consequence of this table is that a single headcount number is meaningless. A site with two hundred badges may contain ninety employees and a hundred and ten people whose statutory position is somebody else's paperwork and your residual liability.

Some obligations follow the workplace rather than the payroll, so blending does not divide them.

• Safety. Duties in respect of the workplace extend to people working there regardless of who employs them, and an incident involving a contractor worker is an incident at your establishment.
• Harassment. The obligation to provide a complaints mechanism covers women at the workplace including those engaged through a contractor, and a complaint against your employee by a vendor's worker is yours to handle.
• Access and data. Contractor workers frequently have system access, and their onboarding and revocation are usually the weakest part of the access control regime.
• Registers and records. Requirements to maintain registers in respect of contractor workers sit with the principal employer as well as with the contractor.
• Working hours and rest. Where hours are set by your operations, they are your practice regardless of whose payroll the person is on.

Verify the principal employer duties, the register requirements and the safety obligations under the Occupational Safety, Health and Working Conditions Code, 2020, and the coverage of the Sexual Harassment of Women at Workplace (Prevention, Prohibition and Redressal) Act, 2013, before assuming any of these are the vendor's responsibility.

The management instinct is to treat everyone identically, which is decent and which is also how a contract arrangement becomes an employment relationship.

• Supervision. Instructions to contractor workers should run through the contractor's supervisor rather than directly from your line managers, in practice and not only on paper.
• Performance management. Appraising a contractor's worker in your performance system, with your ratings and your increment, is evidence of employment.
• Discipline. Misconduct by a contractor worker is raised with the contractor, and removal from your site is a contract remedy rather than a dismissal you administer.
• Benefits. Extending employee benefits selectively to contractor workers blurs the line; where you want to provide something such as transport or canteen access for practical reasons, provide it to everyone on site as a facility rather than as a benefit of employment.
• Duration. Long unbroken deployment of the same individuals on core work is the fact pattern most likely to be looked through, whatever the contract says.

The honest resolution, where the work is core and continuing and the people are effectively yours, is to employ them, whether permanently or on a fixed term.

• Maintain one record of everyone working for you, with engagement type, start date, contractor name and site. Nothing else in this entry is possible without it.
• Audit vendor compliance rather than accepting an indemnity. Wage payment, contribution challans and licence validity should be checked on a schedule, because the indemnity is worth whatever the vendor is worth when it is called on.
• Reconcile the vendor invoice against attendance you can see, not against a headcount the vendor asserts.
• Include contractor workers in induction, safety briefing and the grievance mechanism, and record that they were included.
• Revoke access on the day someone leaves the site, which requires the vendor to tell you, which requires the contract to say so.
• Report the mix to leadership. A function delivering its plan with sixty per cent of its people on someone else's payroll is a fact the plan should state.