"The hardest part of fixing a contingent workforce program is not finding the right answer. It is moving anything at all inside a large enterprise."
If you run a contingent workforce program, you have lived this. What stops you from improving your program is rarely the strategy, and it is rarely the supplier. It is friction and inertia. And that is true of almost anything you try to change inside a large enterprise.
Inertia
Inertia means that the default is inaction. Somebody made a choice five, ten, or twenty years ago. Contingent workforce program leaders live with this every day, because the bias in an enterprise is toward inaction, not action. Doing nothing is the safe default, even when it is quietly the expensive one.
Friction
Then there is friction, the machinery you have to move through to implement anything new. Complex buying processes. Many people have to weigh in. I have had program leaders tell me, I would love to use this; it would be faster and cheaper, but it is going to take me the next 18 months to implement. Eighteen months. That sounds insane, and it is completely normal in the enterprise.
How you actually move it
So your job, as the person running the program, is to break the inertia and remove the friction. You do not do that with a better spreadsheet. You do it with people. You line up leadership support, and you get your hiring managers and functional leaders to look at what you want to bring in and get genuinely excited about it.
Because the moment a functional leader says, if I could engage qualified AI talent in Southeast Asia, which I cannot get today, I would use that tomorrow, everything changes. Now you have a champion. Somebody who wants the outcome badly enough to help you push it through, to make the buying process move, to break the status quo, and to drive adoption once it lands, because they are too bought in to go back.
And notice what earns that reaction. It is a solution that gives them real flexibility: talent globally, engaged compliantly wherever they are, fast, through a good experience, at a reasonable cost, from a supplier that can do more than one thing. When a leader sees that, they stop being an obstacle and become your engine.
So if you have the right solution and it is still not moving, the problem is probably not the solution. Who is your champion, the person who wants this badly enough to push it through? And if you cannot name them yet, that is your real next step.
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Author
Ernesto Lamaina
GM, Lifted
Ernesto Lamaina is the General Manager of Lifted, an Upwork company dedicated to helping enterprises source, engage, and manage contingent talent across every contract type—independent contractors, staff augmentation, employer of record, and managed services.
