Welcome to this issue of The Contingent Compass. Each week, I send two essays to help you navigate the complex world of the Contingent Workforce. If you need support on your journey, upgrade to a paid subscription where you’ll instantly be able to interact with the community through group chat, live Q&A’s, gain access practical program tools and useful how-to guides.
Here’s a truth that stings: nobody cares how many people you onboarded last quarter. If the work isn’t getting done, those numbers are just expensive wallpaper for your board reports. 📊
Most workforce strategies, especially global contingent programs, are still stuck on the wrong scoreboard. Every stakeholder meeting starts the same way: someone asks how many open requisitions there are, how many contractors are engaged, and whether you’re on headcount plan. It sounds like control. It feels measurable. It looks neat on a dashboard for the board and investors.
But here’s the uncomfortable truth: headcount isn’t the goal. Work being completed is the goal. If the projects that fuel revenue aren’t being delivered, if customer commitments are slipping, if products aren’t shipping, then headcount numbers are nothing more than a false sense of progress. Bodies in seats don’t pay the bills. Finished projects do. ✅
The Big Lie: Headcount Equals Progress
There’s a dangerous myth in many organizations that more people automatically means more progress. You can staff a project with the perfect mix of full-time employees, contractors, and consultants, and still miss deadlines, blow budgets, or fail to hit strategic targets. And when that happens, no CEO or CFO will ever say to you, “Well, at least our contingent headcount metrics looked good.” They will only ask you one thing: “Why isn’t the work getting done?”
One CFO I worked with recently put it bluntly: “I don’t care how many people we’ve got - I care about why our $50M launch is still slipping.” Translation: your charts mean nothing if the business isn’t making money.
🪞 Reflection time: When was the last time you reviewed your headcount reports and honestly asked yourself, “Is this showing real progress, or just activity?”
The Cost of Measuring the Wrong Thing
Global workforce programs love metrics. Time-to-fill. Rate cards. Tenure limits. Compliance checkboxes. They’re all necessary, but they don’t answer the fundamental question that truly matters: did this talent investment actually move the needle on revenue and profit? 💰
Research shows that over 62% of major initiatives miss deadlines or fail to deliver expected ROI, even when headcount plans are fully staffed. Gartner estimates companies waste up to 20% of their labor spend every year on work that adds no measurable business value. That’s not a staffing issue. That’s a strategy issue.
I’ve seen companies spend hundreds of millions of dollars on contingent labor while still missing growth targets because no one was connecting labor spend to project outcomes. Teams were fully staffed, every KPI looked green, but major launches slipped, customers were left waiting, and opportunities were lost. In tight markets, CFOs go straight to cutting headcount because they’ve never been shown the real return on that investment. You need to make that link for them. That is your opportunity. That is your moment to shine.
🪞 Reflection time: If you had to defend every headcount dollar in terms of profit delivered, how much of your current workforce spend would survive the cut?
The Real Unit of Strategy: Work Delivered is Value Created
Every worker you engage, whether full-time or contingent, is an investment. The return isn’t a filled seat; it’s projects completed on time, services shipped and billed, new markets opened, customers won, and innovations brought to life ahead of the competition.
I once worked with a global tech firm that had over 1,500 contingent workers on a flagship program. Every operational KPI looked flawless: cost per hire, time-to-fill, supplier compliance. Yet the product launch those workers were meant to support slipped by six months, costing tens of millions in lost revenue. We rebuilt their approach to track what I call the Work-to-Value Chain - mapping every talent decision to outcomes that generated measurable business value. The next launch, with fewer people but the right focus, delivered ahead of schedule and saved 18% in delivery costs.
🪞 Reflection time: Are you engaging headcount to hit a number, or to hit a target that matters to your CFO?
Why Current Contingent Programs Fail the C-Suite
Most contingent programs were designed for cost control and risk mitigation. They sit in Procurement or HR, focused on efficiency and process. All important, but tactical. They rarely answer the questions CEOs and CFOs care about: are we enabling growth or slowing it down? Are we getting more value than cost? How much revenue do we lose when projects slip because workforce execution failed?
And here’s the kicker: many programs measure success in terms of how busy everyone looks, not whether the work is actually done. That’s like celebrating how many taxis are on the road without checking if anyone ever made it to their destination. 🚕
The Work-to-Value Chain: A Smarter Lens for Strategy
Here’s the model I use with clients: the Work-to-Value Chain. It’s about connecting every workforce decision directly to business impact. First, define the outcomes that matter - the work that drives revenue and growth. Then, map talent deployment to those outcomes. Track time-to-value and cost-to-value, not just time-to-fill. Hold suppliers, managers, and PMOs accountable for delivering results, not just filling requisitions. When you do this, workforce strategy shifts from being a cost to manage to an engine for profit and growth.
🪞 Reflection time: If you stripped away every non-essential role, could you still deliver the projects that matter most? If not, do you know where the real gaps are?
Shifting the Conversation to Profit and Growth
A truly strategic workforce program doesn’t talk in terms of headcount. It talks in terms of output. It’s funded by projects, not positions. It aligns suppliers and managers around delivery, not transactions. It connects talent investment directly to financial performance.
The companies that win in the future won’t have the biggest payroll or the largest contractor network. They’ll have the clearest line of sight from talent to value - deploying the right capability, at the right time, to deliver results faster than anyone else. This is how contingent labor becomes a profit-driving advantage, not just a cost-saving tactic. 💡
And honestly, if your workforce strategy can’t explain how it accelerates profit growth, you don’t have a strategy - you have a spreadsheet. 📉
The CEO Wake-Up Call
Five years from now, workforce strategies that can’t show direct ties to profit will disappear. The winners will stop counting heads and start building work-to-value engines - systems that translate workforce decisions into tangible business growth. The rest will keep hiring… and keep losing.
Next time you present workforce strategy to the board, ask yourself: could you stand in front of your CEO and CFO and prove that talent investments are accelerating revenue, boosting margins, and driving growth? Or would you be showing charts about headcount and cost per hour?
One makes you an administrator. The other makes you a strategic driver of enterprise value.
In the end, it’s not about how many people you employ or engage. It’s about whether the work that fuels growth is actually getting done – fast enough, smart enough, and profitably enough to win. 🏆
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If you need support on your journey, upgrade to a paid subscription where you’ll instantly be able to interact with the community through group chat, live Q&A’s, gain access practical program tools and useful how-to guides.