What is secondment?
Secondment is an arrangement in which a consultancy assigns one of its own employees to work at or for a client, while remaining that person's legal employer. The consultancy keeps the employment contract, the payroll and the employer obligations. The client gets the capability for the duration of the assignment.
Nothing about the employment changes when the assignment changes. That continuity is the point of the model.
How is secondment different from staff augmentation and interim work?
Staff augmentation describes the commercial shape of a deal: extra capacity, directed by the client. Secondment describes the legal shape: whose employee the person is. The two often describe the same assignment from different angles, which is why they are used interchangeably even though they answer different questions.
An interim contract is genuinely different. There the employer is a licensed temporary-work agency operating under a specific statutory regime, and the assignment needs one of the reasons that regime permits.
Where does employer authority have to stay in a Belgian secondment?
With the consultancy. This is the constraint that shapes every secondment in Belgium, because making personnel available to a third party is tightly restricted here. The client can give instructions about the work; it cannot take over the employer role.
In practice the consultancy keeps the decisions on pay, evaluation, discipline, leave and the end of the employment. When those decisions drift to the client, the arrangement stops being secondment and starts to resemble unlawful provision of personnel, with the client exposed as the real employer.
What does secondment give each side?
The client gets a capability without a hire, and without carrying the employment risk when the need ends. The consultant gets one employer across changing projects, seniority that keeps accruing, and no exposure to the gaps between assignments. The consultancy carries the risk in the middle, which is what it is paid to do.
It answers a different question from Employer of Record (EOR), which exists to solve a presence problem rather than a capability one. Where the need is delivery, see how Sparagus staffs client projects with its own consultants.
