The bureaucratic nature of audit work should hardly be a surprise to anyone. Within the walls of a professional services firm, particularly one with a cornerstone assurance practice, navigating through a labyrinth of red tape is just normal, standard practice. And while cumbersome, the many types of internal procedures and controls are justified by the rigorous quality standards set forth by external regulators.

These rules extend their reach into every corner of our operations, from high-level strategy to the minutiae of day-to-day tasks, with a notable impact on our contingent workforce operations. Our journey to date in developing the next phase of our contingent workforce management program has taught many valuable lessons, one of which being that the very constraints that once challenged us have ultimately led to a refinement and strengthening of our overall program.

For the uninitiated, audit procedure controls are the essential frameworks that guide the audit process, acting like guardrails to ensure everything runs smoothly and ethically. They encompass a variety of systematic checks and balances, including things like meticulous documentation reviews, stringent independence checks and strategic resource allocations — all of which help safeguard the precision and reliability of financial statements. While these controls are specific to auditing, they significantly influence our approach to selecting and integrating our contingent workforce.

What we found notable while designing our program’s next phase is that many of the controls that we had to follow for audit quality reasons had direct parallels with best practices we incorporated into our contingent workforce management program. This includes crafting detailed business cases, conducting comprehensive background checks and strategically planning for the portions of client delivery that would be executed through this vital delivery model.

Although the similarities were there, the application of controls upon controls can quickly become a hat on a hat: unnecessary, overcomplicated and just not a good look. In a contingent workforce context, excessive controls risked limiting our burst capability for meeting staffing needs and bogging down the team in processes and documentation that could delay our ability to help our hiring managers. A professional services firm is also an exceptionally matrixed leadership landscape, often making internal approvals complex and time intensive to obtain.

The needs of the business eventually became loud and clear: Our internal stakeholders wanted a program that could provide a single source of knowledge about contingent workers and could onboard the right workers quickly, all while providing a strong sense of trust that it was all being done above board for every possible standard. In our existing landscape of procedures, policies and guidelines, it made us realize that we needed to bring in a few more.

Operating without getting tangled in our own web required establishing clear processes with accompanying documentation and a strong digital footprint from which to draw our reporting. By mirroring the discipline and structure inherent in our audit practices, we developed a governance framework that balances the need for swift decision-making with the imperative of maintaining integrity and oversight. Navigating within the audit firm’s environment was crucial, but it also fast-tracked building trust with our stakeholders at all levels, assuring them of the sound guardrails in place around the program.

The whole exercise was a testament to how the principles of audit can be effectively applied to enhance the management of a contingent workforce, turning potential constraints into stepping stones for excellence and even a potential competitive advantage. It’s worth asking: How might your program benefit from taking a page out of an accountant’s playbook and applying a greater focus on your overall governance?