Agency Workers Regulations: Do you know your temp costs?

Jan. 31, 2011 - PRLog -- The introduction of the Agency Workers Regulations (AWR) is forcing organisations to obtain more accurate details regarding their temporary agency labour spend.  The truth is that most organisations do not know their expenditure regarding temporary agency labour, where it is being allocated or how costs are being calculated.  We regularly hear organisations estimating their spend with a variance of millions.

For example, they might say: “it’s between £5 and £7 million” – quite a big difference – though not surprising in light of the nature of the temporary agency labour market. In fact, we find this kind of guess work quite common among even the largest of organisations.  Often individual locations are responsible for employing their own temporary agency workforce as and when it is needed, allowing costs to creep up unbeknown to head office. The irony is that this has an impact on the whole organisation and its yearly temporary agency labour expenditure, though it goes largely undetected by heads of procurement and finance.

Evidently, we have found that even if a company’s estimations of yearly spend are accurate, the number of firms who are aware of their spend by specific location, job type, supplier and working time, not to mention how the specific charge rates are made up and calculated, remains extremely low. And yet… this information will be key to implementation of the AWR.

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de Poel are the number 1 procurers of temporary workers, saving its clients over £500M every year. For our customers we cut costs, reduce administrative burden, bring visability and transparancy, raise compliance and improve cashflow.