Leveling the Paying Field: Game Over for Pay Equity Gaps within the Enterprise

Today’s Enterprise: 50%+ of the Workforce is Non-Employee with No Assurance of Equal Pay

With the explosion of demand in recent years for contingent workers and SOW services, the Extended Workforce is responsible for 50% or more of the work getting done in most large enterprises. The labor market for contract talent is highly competitive, and rates have been changing with greater-than-usual volatility as companies pull whatever levers they can to fill open roles. Under these circumstances, pay levels within a given organization run the risk of greater variability, just as these same companies are pushing to make progress on internal equity. Yet another reason why Extended Workforce DEI is a top priority for most large enterprise programs.

The good news for labor today’s Extended Workforce buyer is that tools exist to help further the cause of pay equity in parallel with ensuring the right levels of offer competitiveness in the labor market. Brightfield’s TDX Extended Workforce intelligence platform enables companies to achieve resource-level pay rate visibility, by integrating enterprise worker data with market data and enabling like-for-like resource comparisons. Data-led processes remove judgement and bias because the output is denominated in the role-specific pay rates of the actual resources performing the work. With real-time insight into the pay rates of contracted individuals, companies can take corrective actions any time a rate gap surfaces, ensuring both pay equity and competitiveness across the Extended Workforce.

Of course, the tools for visibility and better decision-making are only half the battle. Best-practice companies take important organizational and procedural steps to create a comprehensive approach to achieving the pay equity objective:

• • Over-communicate (internally and externally) that pay equity is required and non-negotiable
  • Push for maximum vigilance from internal programs/MSPs to identify and close pay equity gaps immediately
  • Regularly review Contingent Workforce classifications for role, experience, location, and resource-specific pay and bill rates
  • Establish common-sense procurement policies that all SOWs require resource-level details
  • Bring suppliers into the conversation with clear expectations of why pay rate visibility is required
  • Develop criteria favoring suppliers best positioned to bring diversity and performance to the organization
  • Rapidly scale continuous pay equity oversight with reliable market data and insight-led automation tools

Automation for Sustainable Management of Pay Equity at Scale

Brightfield’s TDX tool is central to the efforts of many enterprise labor buying organizations looking to keep a strong—continuous—handle on their pay equity practices. While traditional procure-to-pay or vendor management systems help capture transactions correctly at the CW or SOW and supplier levels (the bill rates), they fail to consistently interrogate resource-level pay rates to ensure the workers performing the work are getting paid equitably for similar work. Launched in early 2022, TDX’s Rate Intelligence feature closes this critical gap in the marketplace by ensuring resource-level details can be both benchmarked real-time and continuously monitored for pay rate compliance.

As just one example of the power behind combining Extended Workforce market intelligence, analysis and automation, Brightfield has helped a major technology manufacturer identify and remediate up to a 20% variation on rates that was not only impeding its ability to hire key resources in U.S. locations but also was unintentionally contributing to a below-average level of DEI program maturity. In fewer than four months of using TDX for SOW reviews, and through a requirement that suppliers provide resource-level details, pay equity gaps are now managed through automation and monitored for, in this company’s instance, board-of-directors-level visibility. All the while simultaneously improving SOW procurement cycle time and cost efficiency through the use and adoption of TDX.

Case Study | Utilizing TDX, modern AI-led + SaaS-delivered platform for the automation of extended workforce Pay Equity visibility and compliance:

If you would like to learn more about gaining greater visibility into your Extended Workforce resources, to help drive better outcomes for both the business and the labor market, please contact us or request a demo now.