Not one to move slowly or shy away from a challenge, Madelyn Abreu, Syngenta Group’s global extended workforce management lead, took a diverse project team with cross-functional capabilities from strategy to delivery of the company’s first contingent workforce management program after joining the firm in October 2021.

“When I came in, there was fragmentation and usage of master vendors, spreadsheets and emails,” she says. By January 2022, she had drafted a plan and secured the support of the HR leadership team of the Syngenta Group to upgrade the management of the external workforce in key markets subject to seasonal fluctuations and heavily impacted by weather as well as government regulatory environments.

Abreu’s program is built using a workable approach with cross-functional collaboration that focuses on end users. She started with something as simple as establishing “contingent worker” as the descriptor for workers across countries and languages. To ensure she created a sustainable roadmap, she made sure “the level of change was something people could consume.” Standardization and complexity reduction have made her program simple to use, so adoption is strong. “If it’s not simple for the stakeholder, people will look for an alternative route to get what they want.”

Abreu knew data was also integral to her program’s success, so she established an agile, technology-based program with an AI-powered VMS that is integrated with finance, identity management and HR to foster critical collaboration.

As Abreu continues to build solutions, she is always imagining what comes next. “I’m humble enough to know I don’t have all the answers but creative enough to use my knowledge and network to find solutions for our stakeholders,” she says.