Today’s organizations face a critical challenge: they must remain agile enough to pivot quickly in an increasingly dynamic marketplace while maintaining stability and sustainable growth. The pace of change is visible in the tenure of Dow Jones Industrial Average (DJIA) members. For most of the 20th century, average tenure held steady at roughly 60 years; in the 2020s, it has fallen to approximately 25 years.
Success in the modern business environment demands greater flexibility from both operations and cost structures. Historically, companies had to choose between flexibility at the expense of continuity and structure at the expense of agility. Many have found an answer in the contingent workforce—freelancers, contractors, agency staff, and gig workers who are redefining the rules of work.
Why Contingent Talent Matters
- Agility and flexibility: Scale your workforce up or down with ease, adapting to seasonal spikes, market swings, or new growth opportunities.
- Specialized skills, anytime: Access niche expertise without long-term commitments, accelerating project delivery and innovation cycles.
- Cost efficiency: Shift from fixed overhead to a variable model that aligns labor costs with revenue and creates financial resilience.
The use of contingent workers has also come with compromises—most critically, a lack of visibility into the workforce, its productivity, and its relationships. These data blind spots can hide inefficiencies in outsourced labor models, including unused capacity, spending on work that is misaligned with business priorities, and inaccurate third-party billing for time not worked.
Enterprise leaders are addressing these challenges through the evolution of workforce intelligence as a core platform for optimizing the modern labor model. The category leader in this space is SLKone partner Sapience Workforce Intelligence. The Sapience platform shines a light on the performance and output of contingent workforce relationships. When managed strategically, contingent talent enables organizations to “have their cake and eat it too”—achieving efficiency and innovation alongside agility and resilience.
The Contingent Workforce Challenge: Risks Without Governance
While contingent labor brings flexibility, it also introduces complexity:
- Hidden spending scattered across business units and often invisible to leadership.
- A lack of data and metrics to manage spending and productivity effectively.
- An inability to manage contingent-worker vendor relationships strategically and objectively.
Without governance supported by relevant insights, these risks undermine the very benefits companies seek.
The Contingent Workforce Challenge: Costs Without Accountability
Most labor-based services rely on supplier self-reporting and manager approval to validate time—a process riddled with risk. In many organizations, the process looks like this:
- A contractor enters their hours into a Vendor Management System (VMS).
- A manager approves the time based on a general sense of the work completed.
- The invoice is paid, often without deeper scrutiny.
This approach assumes trust but lacks objective verification. The tools and processes involved are designed for tracking and automation, not authentication.
The core challenge is that supplier self-reporting, combined with manager approval, does not guarantee that billed hours equate to hours actually worked or value delivered. Ignoring this gap exposes companies to financial risk through overpayment for unworked or under-delivered time, contract overruns, and diminished supplier accountability. It also hampers the shift toward outcome- or deliverable-based agreements, which represent a growing best practice for managing contingent labor.
How the Sapience Workforce Intelligence Platform Works
SapienceIQ is a privacy-first, enterprise-grade platform that passively collects activity data from endpoints such as laptops, virtual machines, and desktops used by third-party labor. The Sapience data collector, IQ Link, captures signals from active application usage, including mouse and keyboard interactions and time spent in work-relevant tools. Combining this data builds a comprehensive picture of how work is performed across vendors, locations, and business units.
The platform also integrates with existing VMS and project management systems to enhance current workflows and create data correlations. SapienceIQ enables organizations to validate reported time, improve supplier accountability, identify high-performing vendors, and uncover hidden productivity losses. As a result, companies can realize measurable cost savings—often exceeding 30%—within months of deployment.
The Opportunity: Total Talent Management
Forward-thinking organizations are reframing contingent workforce management as a strategic differentiator. By adopting a holistic approach enabled by workforce intelligence, they can achieve breakthrough outcomes in vital operational categories:
- Unified visibility: Technology platforms centralize contingent workforce data, turning a blind spot into a source of insight.
- Maximized ROI from contingent labor: Correlating supplier-reported hours with actual labor activity helps identify anomalies and potential overbilling while supporting continuous supplier performance improvement.
- Supplier ecosystem strategy: Strategic partnerships, blended with digital marketplaces, create a resilient and diversified sourcing model.
The Payoff: Have Your Cake and Eat It Too
Companies that embrace contingent workforce management as a priority achieve more than cost savings:
- Faster innovation through access to global skills on demand.
- Sustainable growth by balancing fixed and variable costs.
- More resilient vendor relationships that evolve beyond transactional interactions.
Conclusion
Contingent talent is no longer a tactical lever—it is a strategic asset. The organizations that thrive in the future will be those that seamlessly integrate contingent and full-time workforces into one strategy.
With the right governance, technology, and process-driven approach, businesses can rise to the challenges of workforce management. They can gain the flexibility of contingent labor while retaining the stability of core employees.
If your organization is looking to adopt a contingent workforce model or better manage its existing contingent workforce, learn how SLKone, powered by Sapience, can help. Contact Andrew Klemm or Drew Wedemeyer.
About SLKone
SLKone is more than a consulting firm—we are your partner in translating complex business challenges into tangible results. Our hands-on approach means we work side by side with your team, delivering actionable solutions that directly affect your bottom line. We do not just provide solutions; we bridge the gap between your challenges and measurable outcomes. Using data-driven insights and deep industry expertise, we create tailored strategies that span industries and deliver lasting results.
Learn more at slkone.com.
About Sapience Analytics
Sapience delivers workforce intelligence that helps enterprises optimize organizational effectiveness, enhance productivity, and improve operational performance. With its privacy-first platform, Sapience helps organizations make smarter decisions about workforce allocation, performance management, and cost optimization. Sapience clients include leading global banks, insurance and financial services institutions, technology services integrators, digital products and solutions companies, healthcare providers, and worldwide energy services companies, among others.
Learn more at sapienceanalytics.com.
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