What 700 leaders at $100M+ organizations told us about complexity, compliance, and the path forward
Enterprise contingent workforce programs were not designed to be complicated. They grew that way.
A new vendor here to cover a regional gap. A different system there to handle onboarding. HR taking ownership of one piece, Procurement another, Talent Acquisition a third. None of those decisions were wrong on their own. Together, they produced something most enterprise leaders now recognize as a real problem: a fragmented, costly, increasingly hard-to-govern program that was supposed to deliver flexibility but often feels like anything but.
People2.0 recently commissioned original market research with 700 enterprise decision-makers at organizations with $100M or more in annual revenue across AMER, EMEA, and APAC. What we found was a consistent picture of programs under pressure, and enterprises that know exactly what they need to fix.
Here are three things the data revealed.
Most enterprises are managing more vendors than they can effectively govern
Nearly half of the enterprise leaders we surveyed (46%) are managing six or more external vendors to support their contingent workforce. Close to one in five are managing more than ten.
That level of vendor complexity does not happen deliberately. But once it accumulates, the operational and compliance implications are significant. And managing multiple vendors and suppliers ranked as the second biggest challenge in managing a contingent workforce among the leaders we surveyed.
The full data tells a more specific story about how it happens and what it costs.
Compliance confidence is not the same as compliance readiness
Most enterprise leaders feel reasonably confident about their compliance posture. But nearly half (46%) stop short of saying they are “very confident” in their organization’s compliance with labor laws and worker classification requirements across all the jurisdictions where they operate.
What is more telling: 47% say improving compliance and reducing risk is a top priority for the next 12 to 24 months. Those two figures together suggest that compliance confidence and compliance readiness are not measuring the same thing.
HR and Procurement are both at the table. They are not always reading from the same page.
Contingent workforce decisions are no longer owned by a single department. Our research found that HR, Workforce Procurement, and Talent Acquisition all exert significant influence, and no single function consistently holds primary authority.
When those priorities diverge, the consequences show up in the data. Internal alignment between HR and Procurement ranked as the third most common challenge in managing a contingent workforce, cited by 39% of respondents. A quarter of enterprises describe the relationship between those two functions as only somewhat aligned or worse.
The report goes into what that misalignment looks like in practice and where the biggest operational exposure tends to sit.
The full picture is in the report
These three findings are a starting point. The State of Contingent Workforce Management Report: Enterprise Edition goes deeper on all of them: the root causes behind the complexity, what the data says about where programs are succeeding and falling short, and what a more sustainable path forward looks like for enterprises managing contingent workforces at scale.
Download the full report to see where your program stands against the data.
About this research: People2.0 commissioned this study via Pollfish in May 2026. A total of 700 enterprise decision-makers participated, all at organizations with $100M or more in annual revenue and all holding direct involvement in contingent workforce decisions. Respondents spanned six countries across AMER, EMEA, and APAC.
