Contingent Workforce Programs Overcome Resistance With Escalation Power From The Top

Every few years a company stands up a new system to get control of a contingent workforce problem: it buys the platform, hires the team or an outside provider, writes the policy, and watches the same failures resurface a year later. The reflex is to blame the technology and start the search over. The more uncomfortable explanation is that the tool was never the weak point. Without authority behind the program, a policy is merely a suggestion. Business units opt out, and no platform can compensate for the missing mandate. That pattern holds well beyond any single function, and it's the factor that decides whether programs fail or last.

Eric Osterhout is a contingent labor leader with a global manufacturer of specialty chemical products. Across nearly two decades running CWM programs on the client side, plus earlier stints in staffing and on the managed-service side, he's watched the same roles and the same problems cycle through company after company. His diagnosis is that the fix is rarely technical.

"You can write a policy that outlines the guidelines and the scope of what you're doing, but you need the highest levels of the organization to put their name on it and make it policy with teeth in it," he asserts. The distinction between a program that holds and one that unravels, in his experience, usually traces back to where the decision to build it was made.

To have teeth, the mandate must come from the top

Osterhout's central argument is that most contingent workforce programs are launched from too low in the organization to hold. "In many organizations, the decision to move forward and centralize contingent labor tends to be done at a lower level," he says, typically a procurement director who sees the value and pulls in a VP. They secure a system and a team, and then miss the step that determines everything downstream. "They don't get that sanctioning from the executive leadership to say, 'We're going to put our name on it.'"

A policy without consequences for ignoring it, in his telling, is not really a policy at all. "If people don't adhere, there need to be repercussions in one manner or another," he says, framing that backstop as what lets a program lead push change through resistance. "There are some points where instead of the carrot, you have to have that stick."

The sponsorship Osterhout means isn't simply a one-time approval, but a standing escalation point that actually gets used. Once leadership agrees on the program's scope and a policy defines it, that backing becomes the lever for the cases persuasion can't close. In practice, the resistance looks mundane: a business unit that keeps using its own favored staffing agency instead of approved suppliers, negotiating its own off-benchmark rates, or hiring contractors outside the system entirely, but each is an exception that erodes the cost control and visibility the program exists to create. "Executive sponsorship gives you that fallback to go to leadership and say, 'These are the suggestions we made. Here's where your business units are failing to adopt the recommendations, and here's why,'" he explains.

Knee-jerk resets cost the most

Real change takes years, and the hardest part of a successful CW program to sustain, he acknowledges, is patience, especially in an environment where the appearance of forward motion is prized as much as the real thing. His answer is to let the data carry the argument for staying the course. "Even if the pace is incrementally slow, if you can continue to bring the data back that says we're making improvements, and show how faster improvements could be made, you can make the case."

The failure mode he warns against is the panic reset, often triggered by a leader who reacts before understanding what actually went wrong. "Someone sees something come up because they got an email, and then they don't investigate it and realize it has nothing to do with what the supplier did, it has nothing to do with what we did as a program," he says. That reflex is expensive. Ripping out a provider or a system that wasn't the problem, he notes, forces another costly implementation, lost opportunities, and wasted time re-integrating dozens of downstream systems. He prefers a more honest framing of what a program should strive for. "I don't believe in 'steady state.' I use the term 'steadier state' because you're dealing with people and something that touches so many parts of an organization."

AI and the tools are enablers, not the answer

For all his emphasis on people and policy, Osterhout is no technology skeptic. He was an early adopter of vendor management systems and reaches for the same point about AI. The anxiety that it will erase jobs strikes him as a familiar overreaction. "Since the industrial revolution we've had technology advances. People learn to get new skills and adapt." He uses AI himself to compress work that used to take days.

But the tools only amplify a program that is already sound, which returns him to the lesson underneath everything else. After implementing three enterprise vendor management systems and hearing each one praised and cursed, Osterhout's conclusion is that the platform is rarely the real variable. "It's not usually the technical platform that causes the distaste from people. It's the policies, the processes, and the implementation of those technologies," he says. The uncomfortable implication for any leader tempted to buy their way out of a broken program is that the software was probably never the problem. "It could be poor planning, poor implementation, and a poor program built around it."