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.
Ask five executives who owns the contingent workforce, and you’ll get seven different answers - plus one nervous laugh.
Some will say HR. Others point to Procurement. A few will wave vaguely toward Legal, Finance, or “that MSP we hired.” But when you really press them on who’s accountable for outcomes - cost, compliance, performance, brand experience - the room goes quiet.
That silence? That’s the sound of the accountability vacuum.
And it’s one of the most expensive, misunderstood problems in workforce strategy today.
💡 Reflection time: If 40% of your workforce is contingent, and no one truly owns it, who’s actually running your business?
The Great Ownership Illusion
On paper, it looks like everyone’s got it covered.
HR “owns” talent strategy and culture.
Procurement “owns” cost control and vendor management.
Legal “owns” compliance.
Finance “owns” spend oversight.
But in reality? No one owns the full picture. Each function guards its slice of the pie - yet no one’s baking the pie itself.
This is the corporate equivalent of a relay race where everyone’s holding the baton but no one’s running.
HR thinks Procurement will catch the compliance issues. Procurement assumes Legal’s watching classification. Legal assumes HR’s checking engagement. And Finance assumes someone, somewhere, is tracking the numbers properly.
Spoiler alert: they’re not.
The Symptoms of the Vacuum
The symptoms are subtle at first. A few rogue suppliers here. A few inconsistent rates there. Then the cracks widen:
🚨 Compliance breaches that “no one saw coming.”
💸 Savings that look good on paper but never hit the P&L.
🕵️ Data scattered across ten systems that don’t talk to each other.
😑 Hiring managers who just bypass the whole process because it’s too slow.
Sooner or later, the “unowned” contingent workforce starts behaving like a shadow organization - invisible, unmeasured, and yet quietly critical to everything the business delivers.
It’s not that leaders don’t care. It’s that they’re missing a governance model that gives them clear accountability and cross-functional authority.
💡 Reflection time: When was the last time your leadership team discussed contingent strategy without the words “cost” or “compliance”?
The Real Cost of No Ownership
Let’s talk numbers for a second - because accountability (or lack thereof) always leaves a trail of costs.
Without ownership, you get:
Inefficiency: Duplicated processes, conflicting systems, inconsistent onboarding.
Brand inconsistency: Contingent workers experience a completely different company than full-timers do.
Compliance exposure: Misclassification, co-employment risk, and regulatory blind spots.
Supplier waste: Paying premium rates for mediocre delivery.
Data chaos: Incomplete visibility that undermines forecasting, budgeting, and decision-making.
Each of those alone is painful. Together, they form a silent tax on your organization - a tax paid in rework, delays, reputational damage, and missed opportunities.
And the longer the vacuum persists, the harder it is to fix, because dysfunction compounds over time.
Why It Happens
The accountability vacuum isn’t caused by laziness or incompetence. It’s caused by design.
Most organizational structures were never built for a world where nearly half of the workforce operates outside traditional employment.
HR is optimized for FTEs. Procurement is optimized for contracts. Neither is designed to manage a fluid, hybrid, project-based ecosystem that includes freelancers, SOWs, and service providers.
So the extended workforce gets tossed around like an unwanted orphan between departments, each one doing what they can - but none empowered to drive end-to-end outcomes.
💡 Reflection time: If every function is doing the “right thing,” why is the overall outcome still wrong?
What True Ownership Looks Like
True ownership isn’t about taking control - it’s about creating clarity.
Imagine a model where a Contingent Workforce Management Office (CWMO) or Workforce Strategy PMO sits at the intersection of HR, Procurement, and Finance.
Their mission? Simple: manage the entire extended workforce with accountability for performance, cost, and compliance - not just process.
This office becomes the connective tissue.
It doesn’t compete with HR or Procurement. It enables them.
It owns:
✅ Program governance
✅ Vendor strategy
✅ Data integrity
✅ Talent engagement and experience
✅ Risk oversight
And most importantly, it reports up to the C-suite - because this isn’t about who “hires” contractors. It’s about how work gets done.
The Technology Myth
Every organization eventually hits the same wall: “We’ll fix it with technology.”
Enter the Vendor Management System (VMS) - platforms like Beeline, SAP Fieldglass, and others that promise visibility, control, and efficiency.
And to be fair, they deliver - but only as well as the governance structure sitting behind them.
Without ownership, tech just automates dysfunction. You end up with prettier dashboards showing the same broken data.
💻 The truth? Beeline can’t save you from confusion - but it can amplify clarity if you’ve built it first.
👀 Pro tip: Technology should follow strategy, not define it.
The CFO’s Lens: Accountability in Dollars
When accountability fails, it shows up fast in the numbers.
Untracked contingent spend. Duplicate supplier markups. Overlapping contracts.
Finance ends up in a perpetual guessing game - trying to reconcile what’s been spent, where, and on what.
But here’s the shift: accountability isn’t just about avoiding loss. It’s about creating gain.
A truly owned contingent strategy can drive:
📈 Faster time to market
💰 Lower cost per deliverable
🔍 Cleaner compliance visibility
🤝 Stronger supplier ROI alignment
When Finance sees workforce governance not as “red tape” but as “revenue enablement,” the conversation changes entirely.
The CEO’s Blind Spot
Here’s where it gets uncomfortable.
Most CEOs can tell you headcount, turnover, and revenue per employee. But ask them how many contingent workers they have, what they cost, and how they’re managed - and you’ll get a polite shrug.
That’s not a judgment. It’s a reality of how disconnected the contingent layer has become.
Yet that layer is often responsible for 30–50% of the actual work being delivered - from engineering to logistics, marketing to manufacturing.
💡 Reflection time: If your contractors walked out tomorrow, how much of your business would stop?
If the answer makes you uneasy, congratulations - you’ve just found your next transformation priority.
What the Future Looks Like
The future of work won’t be defined by FTE vs. contractor. It’ll be defined by how well organizations orchestrate all types of talent toward outcomes.
Ownership is no longer optional. It’s strategic infrastructure.
Forward-thinking companies are already building:
Unified data layers connecting HRIS, VMS, and finance systems.
Cross-functional steering committees driving shared KPIs.
Governance models that treat contingent labor as part of total talent.
Executive sponsors who understand that agility and accountability go hand-in-hand.
This isn’t about adding bureaucracy - it’s about removing friction.
The Executive Reflection
Let’s pause for a moment and get practical:
Who owns your contingent workforce strategy today?
Who is accountable for its outcomes?
Who has visibility of the full extended workforce - across contractors, consultants, freelancers, and SOWs?
And most importantly, who in the C-suite cares about it?
If your answers are “not sure,” “kind of,” or “we’re working on it,” then you don’t have governance. You have hope.
And hope, while admirable, is not a business strategy.
The Call to the C-Suite
Here’s the hard truth: accountability isn’t something you delegate downward. It starts at the top.
When CEOs, CFOs, and CHROs put their collective weight behind contingent workforce governance, everything else follows - structure, systems, performance, even culture.
When they don’t, programs collapse under the weight of ambiguity.
The C-suite has to stop treating the contingent workforce as a procurement line item and start treating it as a strategic enabler of growth.
Because in the end, this isn’t about who owns the workers.
It’s about who owns the outcomes.
The Final Thought: The Vacuum Is a Choice
Accountability isn’t about blame - it’s about design.
Every accountability vacuum exists because no one decided to fill it. But the companies that do? They gain agility, control, and credibility. They move faster, attract better talent, and spend smarter.
So ask yourself:
💡 If a compliance breach hit tomorrow, who would your CEO call?
💡 If your contingent workforce vanished overnight, what would stop working?
💡 And if your program disappeared, would your business even notice?
Because the answers to those questions reveal whether you’ve built a workforce strategy - or just an expensive spreadsheet.
The vacuum is real, but it’s also optional.
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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.