Workforce Strategy: Is Ownership Moving Away From HR?

Who owns workforce strategy today? Not HR alone, says Mark Coyle, Vertage APAC & India CEO. It's shared across HR, procurement and finance, but in practice, is shaped by whoever controls spend and risk. That's handing more influence to the CPO and CFO, as organizations rethink their mix of permanent employees, contractors, offshore talent and AI-enabled work.

"HR remains critical," Coyle says, but its role is evolving. From owning workforce agenda outright, to shaping the skills, capability and workforce model organizations need to stay competitive. "The businesses that get this right, are the ones that stop treating workforce decisions as separate HR, procurement or finance conversations," he argues.

Getting procurement to engage, Coyle says, means connecting talent to commercial outcomes instead of discussing it in isolation. This is the language procurement budgets understand.

"Better talent means faster delivery and faster delivery has a revenue impact. A poor contractor experience leads to attrition, re-hiring, re-onboarding and lost knowledge, all of which create cost leakage. Once contractor quality is shown to affect delivery, productivity and risk," he says, "it stops being an HR conversation and becomes a business performance one."

The biggest blocker to cross-functional workforce planning, according to Coyle, is ownership, or the lack of it. HR looks after people, procurement looks after suppliers and finance looks after cost. Each mandate makes sense on its own, but none covers the entire workforce, so end-to-end planning stays fragmented.

Coyle is based in Australia, where that fragmentation runs even deeper. Not one labor market, but a patchwork of state-based rules sitting on top of a national one. Reforms like the Fair Work "Closing Loopholes" are forcing organizations to rethink how contingent labor gets structured in the first place. When ownership is split and the rules keep moving, workforce planning stays fragmented.

Good governance should function as enablement, not constraint, Coyle argues. Pre-approved pathways and clean data create speed. A model that works in one region and can be repeated in another creates scale. And knowing that talent or AI can be deployed without legal risk building quietly in the background creates confidence.

On what makes programs move quickly without surprises:

The programs winning in this market, he says, are the ones that can move quickly without surprises.

Asked to design a total workforce management model from scratch, Coyle describes one operating model covering three types of work. Permanent employees for core capability, contingent talent for flexible capacity and agentic or services-based delivery for outcome-based work. The key, he says, is not managing those categories separately, but bringing them together through a single demand intake, supply ecosystem and data layer, so organizations can see what work needs to be done, where the right capability sits and how it should be delivered.

Much of the technology to do this already exists, Coyle notes. "It can solve a large part of the visibility, orchestration and compliance challenge. The harder part is the underlying operating model change, and that is where many organisations get stuck," he says.

Organizations are more exposed on contingent workforce than many realize, Coyle says, often without full visibility. Statement-of-work leakage, supplier-led hiring, or contractor arrangements that sit outside the formal process can create blind spots that don't surface until something forces them into view. Most organizations have governance on paper. Few have true visibility in practice. That gap is where the risk sits.

The challenge is particularly sharp in Australia, where organizations rely heavily on contingent labor within a complex regulatory environment. With reforms such as Closing Loopholes increasing scrutiny, and global specialist talent from markets like India becoming a larger part of how local skills shortages are addressed, Coyle says businesses are often managing compliance risk across multiple labor markets without a clear end-to-end view.

A productive HR, procurement and finance conversation, Coyle says, means one dataset, three lenses: HR on capability and skills, procurement on supply, governance and risk, finance on cost and return. Different questions, same numbers.

That, he argues, is what separates a productive conversation from a political one. Separate data fragments the conversation. The same view sharpens it. What work needs doing, which channel delivers it, at what cost.

Adoption is the first test, Coyle says. A platform can impress in a demo, but if hiring managers work around it, its capabilities don't matter. The best platforms fit how work gets requested, approved and delivered.

The second test is whether it drives action. A useful platform helps teams decide whether to hire, redeploy, re-source or change approach. A weaker one just reports what already happened. The real question, Coyle says, is whether a platform changes behavior at the point of demand. "If it doesn't, it risks becoming an expensive reporting tool rather than something that improves workforce decisions."

Much of what Coyle describes, governance that enables rather than constrains, visibility across every talent category, confidence that deployment carries no hidden legal risk, depends on the legal and payroll infrastructure underneath the workforce model. That's precisely where EOR and AOR come in.

Without the right structure, global growth carries risk. Setting up a legal entity in every new market is slow and costly. Employment law, tax and labor rules shift constantly and are hard to keep pace with. Contractor misclassification risk builds quietly in the background. Payroll, benefits and admin multiply with every new market and every hire. That's usually where growth stalls.

With EOR & AOR, growth compounds. Risk doesn't.

What makes Vertage EOR & AOR different:

• One partner, not a patchwork: EOR and AOR under one roof, instead of managing vendors market by market.
• Compliance built in, not bolted on: Local law, tax and labor rules, handled at the source.
• Risk that leaves your balance sheet: Classification, tax and employment liability transfer to Vertage.
• Coverage where you're headed: Global markets, one consistent standard of compliance.
• Audit-ready, always: documentation on hand for any auditor, board or regulator.

See how Vertage EOR & AOR is built for compliant, flexible global deployment

The organizations that treat governance as a constraint will keep firefighting it. The ones that build it in, wherever they hire, will be the ones moving work forward fastest, with the least risk.