Chris Farmer was tapped by Salesforce in January 2020 to oversee Project Fusion, a complete, end-to-end redesign of the entire non-employee engagement structure. As global contingent program owner, Farmer led the project with a team of more than two dozen people.

With its June launch, Project Fusion became the single point of entry for any non-employee engagement. “If you engage with Salesforce, in any form, and you are not an employee, then Project Fusion would be the scope for that. Systems, tools, processes, teams, structures — anything and everything we are using to engage non-employees,” Farmer says. The tool encompasses payroll and IC compliance, complete SOW audit and worker-classification services, direct sourcing offerings, and the company’s supplier and talent diversity programs.

Getting to the finish line was complex, with the company’s CW program growing amid Covid and the resulting lockdown.  “The challenge was figuring out how to make sure we could really manage all those nonemployees remotely but also make sure they could still be onboarded securely and given laptops and credentials and taken care of from an IT security standpoint,” Farmer says.

The pandemic also promises continuing change, having proved that we do not all have to be in the same office to be really successful, Farmer says. To win going forward, companies must “recruit contingent workers or contract workers all over the globe, and enable them to be just as productive as if they were in the office.”