CIOs are typically responsible for the largest cohort of external workers in an organization. Most of those workers will be engaged on a Statement-of-Work basis with little or no visibility of the skills engaged or whether workers have been correctly offboarded once contracts finish. The lack of worker data means that strategic workforce planning for this or any other external worker population is impossible. 

Optimizing skills and costs across employee and non-employee populations requires deep knowledge of your extended workforce. Total workforce planning necessitates enterprise-wide insight into what skills are available, prior engagements within the organization, availability, certifications, training, and more.

Total Workforce Planning offers CIOs significant opportunity for cost savings beyond managing rate cards alone. Having visibility means planning how the work will be done and the right talent channel to do it, enabling companies to right-source from the beginning. This will deliver an order of magnitude savings over simple rate management.

What's more,  a recent McKinsey study found that 85% of organizations anticipate an increase in IT projects in the next year to respond to the impacts of the pandemic and increase in automation and globalization. With emerging technologies like AI, natural language processing, and blockchain set to enable digital transformations happening, organizations will be increasing their use of highly skilled contingent labor to help fill skills gaps that exist. This amplifies the need for visibility into all aspects of the extended workforce.  

Utmost Extended Workforce System

Today, organizations need an agile, scalable solution that allows for a total workforce approach. Beyond workforce planning, CIOs must enable access to top talent, engage and manage that talent appropriately, and ensure they are classified correctly, mitigating risk from ever-changing legislation that impacts non-employee labor. 

Utmost introduces the CIO to an entirely new and different approach to managing the external workforce, delivering visibility into cost, skills, certifications, and detailed work history across the entire workforce, allowing organizations to plan for the future strategically. 

More than an integration, Utmost natively extends the Workday object model, giving you complete control and visibility of your total extended workforce. Utmost makes Workday the single place for all people management regardless of worker classification (i.e., employee or non-employee). 

Customers use Utmost to solve the following problems: 

Visibility 

For many companies, understanding how many extended workers there are within the organization requires combining data from multiple sources and hours of analyst time to complete. Utmost allows organizations to get a real-time overview of how many workers there are in the enterprise, where they are, what they are doing, which supplier they are from, who is responsible for them, and how much they are being paid.

Identity management

Each worker within Utmost has a unique Worker ID and a persistent profile. This persistent profile allows Utmost to become the system of record for each non-employee. Automatic deduplication checks examine multiple facets of provided worker identity such as contact, national ID, SSN, and personal data to properly identify the worker and correlate them with previous engagements to ensure that only one profile is maintained per worker. 

This persistent profile is independent of the supplier, ensuring visibility should a worker have an assignment with one supplier, leave, and come back with another supplier. The persistent profile also allows a worker to have multiple assignments at the same time. 

All details, including work history, skills, certifications, education, and availability, are maintained in their profile. In addition, the worker profile stores all of a worker's contact and communication information. This allows the organization to get in touch with workers directly (i.e. changes in office logistics) should there be an emergency or need for mass communication. 

A dashboard within Utmost proactively flags any compliance anomalies that need immediate attention, ensuring that issues are addressed in a timely manner.

Analytics on spend by cost & location

By tracking the spend across a worker, Utmost can show exactly how much the organization is spending on a worker and what an individual worker costs. Additionally, with Workday’s Analytics capabilities, we can illustrate what the cost of an external worker is versus an internal worker. This allows for holistic workforce planning and data-informed decision-making about the most appropriate type of hire. 

In addition, this data can be shown by location, allowing different worker types in different locations. Aggregated data can also show what the cost of workers looks like in, for example, a year-on-year comparison. 

Resource planning

In addition, Utmost makes Workday the single-entry point for all requests for workers, whether employee or non-employee or for work to be done (SOW or BPO). More than a decision tree, Utmost’s Front Door guides the hiring manager through a series of steps to identify the optimum classification and sourcing channel for the work that needs to be done. This ensures that each new external worker is hired via the optimum channel. 

Skills, capabilities, & training

The existence of a single, secure, persistent worker profile is transformative. Rather than data being entered into multiple systems and resumes being emailed, there is just one canonical source of worker data. There is one place where worker data is maintained for use by the supplier and hiring organization. Subject to data privacy restrictions, organizations can immediately report on:

• • • • • • Skills
          • Certifications
          • Current engagements 
          • Work history
          • Current background check

As workers move from engagement to engagement, their work history is updated with verified engagements. Critically, the hiring organization maintains connectivity to the worker, even after the engagement has ended. Background checks, training, confidentiality agreements, and other worker-specific documentation continue to be valid across engagements.

Diversity & inclusion

One of the biggest issues impacting the progress of D&I initiatives for the extended workforce is a lack of data. We enable enterprises to understand, accept, and value the diversity of their entire workforce. Utmost provides a complete view of extended workforce diversity: 

• • • • • • Diversity, equity, and inclusion dashboards for external workers 
          • Breakouts of race, ethnicity, gender, age, religion, disability, and sexual orientation
          • View of differences in education, personalities, skill sets, experiences, and knowledge bases 
          • Comparison of diversity metrics between employees and non-employee worker populations 
          • Track supplier performance against your diversity business objectives 
          • Incorporate a diverse supplier strategy with supplier tiering to support enterprises in their inclusion efforts for their extended workforce

Utmost facilitates equity and inclusion by sending surveys to: 

• • • • • • Gauge how extended workers experience the workplace 
          • Qualitatively measure feelings of belonging, access to mentorship and advancement opportunities, incidents of harassment or micro-aggressions, and more 
          • Measure worker satisfaction

The diversity and inclusion data of the workers is obtained via a secure opt-in process through our Worker-Owned Profiles. Utmost’s Worker-Owned Profiles provide real-time access to complete, accurate, and verified data about workers. All workers will have one Utmost profile, ever. Workers own their profiles with the ability to access and update details easily. 

The worker can choose to share their gender, education, skills, certification, and other information with a company. They can then send surveys to workers or/and suppliers to capture additional diversity and inclusion information with worker consent. This enables companies to use this to assess their non-employee talent against D&I objectives.

Utmost and Workday 

One of the most significant challenges integrating external worker systems with Workday is mirroring the Workday objects such as position, organization, etc. If a manager changes or there is organizational restructuring within Workday, there is significant work involved in mirroring those changes in any external database. This is the single most common reason for workers becoming “lost” in external workforce systems.

The Utmost worker object model mirrors the Workday worker object model, including Workday ID (WID), position, cost center, and more.

Organizations typically push external workers to Workday to be included in headcount. In that situation, a worker record exists in Workday and Utmost, tied by the Workday unique ID. Workers that exist in Utmost, but not in Workday (often ‘badged’ workers with no requirements for logical access) are linked via an “accountable worker” (point-of-contact) in Workday. Any change to that “accountable workers’’ organization or position are mirrored in Utmost. 

Harmonization of job roles

Maintaining a common job catalog across Workday and Utmost allows: 

• • • • • Costs, time-to-hire, and frequency by role and skill to be analyzed by project, department/organization, region, and supplier
        • The external workforce to be included in workforce planning
        • With Utmost Front Door, a common job catalog allows the optimum talent sourcing channel to be chosen for all engagements (including internal talent pools, gig-workers, etc.

In addition to connectivity with Workday, the Utmost platform offers a complete integration framework. Integrations can be seamlessly added to business processes. For instance, an onboarding process within Utmost Flow can contain integrations to other enterprise applications managing worker provisioning. Flow processes can also be used to drive scheduled exports for reporting purposes. Alternatively, Utmost can connect to other key enterprise systems such as Learning Management Systems or Provisioning Systems. This enables Utmost to bring back data to store on the worker profile and have one source of truth for all non-employees.

If you want more information on how Utmost works in real-life scenarios, consider attending a live 30 min demo.