Agile Work: Why Workers Distrust It (and How Employers Can Fix It)

Key Takeaways: 

• Indeed’s workforce agility survey shows a trust gap: 67% of employers expect to hire more agile workers, yet 55% of job seekers still see agile work as risky.
• A cultural and systemic gap exists in how organizations reward mobility and normalize nonlinear career paths: While 40% of employers say they look internally for agile talent, only 15% of workers look for agile opportunities within their own companies. 
• This article outlines how to turn agility into a long-term operational strategy: Map distinct career paths, look internally before hiring and pilot agile arrangements iteratively.

Here's the contradiction keeping talent leaders up at night: over two-thirds of employers say they plan to hire more agile workers. Yet the majority of those workers still think of agile work as a career risk. According to Indeed’s new research into workforce agility, you're building a workforce model that your best candidates don't trust.

I've sat on both sides of that table. After the Financial Times acquired my thought leadership agency, Longitude Research, in 2022, I left full-time executive life to become a fractional specialist. That’s how I saw exactly where that trust breaks down and why fixing it is entirely in employers' hands.

An agile workforce is almost inevitable, as it addresses many of the labor market concerns emerging over the next decade. Ultimately, adoption fails due to a problem that employers created and only employers can fix. Here’s how you can close the trust gap.

James Watson, cofounder of thought leadership agency Exhibit B Partners.

Workers Don't Trust the Agile Model, and for Good Reason

For many workers, agile arrangements have felt one-sided. Workers shoulder the burden of managing their careers and income variability. Employers, meanwhile, receive cost savings and the ability to quickly scale their workforce. 

Agile and fractional work defined

Agile work: Expanding the mix of flexible work arrangements, including gig and contract employment, interim or fractional positions, career switching, remote “digital nomad” jobs, AI-augmented positions and job rotations.

Fractional leadership: Ongoing, part-time executive-level support embedded within a company.

According to Indeed’s survey,¹ 70% of employers say nontraditional models improve overall workforce wellbeing, and 55% of job seekers agree that taking on agile roles has helped them thrive. But that can only happen when both parties define the terms going in. Otherwise, agile workers become always-on resources, and the wellbeing benefits simply fail to materialize.

If you want to build a genuinely agile workforce, start by acknowledging the imbalance between the worker and employer and then commit to structural change. That means creating incentive systems that give workers something real in return, such as:

• Bonuses tied to completion milestones
• Visible recognition for specialists who deliver
• Clear impact on career trajectory

To attract and keep the best agile talent, treat external specialists as long-term partners, with clear scope, mutual respect and genuine communication. I find the "tours of duty" concept useful here. A specialist comes in, completes a defined mission with clear parameters and, having delivered real value, moves on. 

Example: Using a fractional finance director to solve a leadership gap

There’s a distinction between a consultant and a fractional leader. A consultant delivers a defined project. A fractional leader provides ongoing, part-time expertise in an area where your organization has a gap. 

When my cofounder and I were growing Longitude, we hit a stage where we needed financial leadership month-to-month but couldn't justify a full-time hire. So we brought in a fractional finance director to provide consistent insight over time.

That's the practical test for any employer choosing between the two models: Is this a problem you need to solve once or insight you need on an ongoing basis? Regardless, it’s key to establish and communicate the difference in expectations.

The Hidden Agile Talent Already Inside Your Organization

One of the more uncomfortable findings in the Indeed report is the gap between how employers and employees view internal agility. Forty percent of employers say they look internally when seeking agile talent, while only 15% of employees say they look for agile opportunities within their own organizations. That mismatch points to a real problem, and in my experience, it's one that organizations create themselves.

In larger organizations, skills tracking tends to live in HR systems that go stale quickly. Employees aren't encouraged to document their full range of capabilities, and managers rarely ask about them. The challenge of capturing and surfacing skills at scale is genuine, but the deeper issue is cultural. When exploring outside your current role could send the message that you're not committed, people may hesitate to take advantage of internal opportunities.

During the Financial Times acquisition, my team made a deliberate point of celebrating internal movement, even when it meant losing someone from our immediate group. We treated mobility as a positive worth openly recognizing. That cultural element mattered more than any formal policy.

Example: Identifying hidden skills on your team

When I once needed a survey translated into Tagalog, we assumed it required an external hire until a team member casually mentioned they’d studied the language at university. The capability was there; we just hadn’t thought to ask.

The lesson: Many “rare” skills are already present in your workforce but remain invisible until you explicitly ask about them in a structured way. Foster an environment in which your teams feel safe raising a hand to step outside of their current roles.

Key data from Indeed’s Workforce Agility Report

67% of employers expect to hire more agile workers in the future 55% of job seekers view agile work as a risky career move 40% of employers look internally for agile talent, but only 15% of workers look for agile opportunities within their orgs

Building a Genuine Agile Workforce Strategy: A Practical Roadmap for Talent Leaders

Most organizations adopt agile workforce models reactively in response to a hiring freeze, a budget cut or a sudden skills gap. Rather than viewing it as crisis management, consider this four-step framework to structure agile roles with intention.

Step 1: Map your career pathways before you redesign anything else

Start by recognizing your workforce’s motivators and goals. Some people want stability and linear progression. Others are drawn to variety and autonomy.

Map out what different pathways actually look like inside your organization and communicate the honest trade-offs of each. Then let people make fully informed choices. Naming these routes explicitly creates a sense of psychological safety that many organizations underestimate.

Step 2: Apply one question to every resourcing decision

Before you write a job description, ask, Do we need this capability all the time?

If yes, hire permanently. If the capability is tied to a specific phase of work, a project with a defined end or an intermittent need, a flexible model will likely outperform a full-time but underutilized hire.

Step 3: Look inside before you look outside

The Indeed workforce agility survey identifies access to specialized skills as one of the top reasons employers turn to external agile talent (nearly a quarter say so). But before posting any role, permanent or agile, audit what talent already exists in your organization.

Recognizing and building up your internal talent indicates a culture based on trust and mobility that leads to long-term retention.

Step 4: Run a pilot before you scale

Agile workforce strategy works best when it’s iterative. Identify one team or function where an agile arrangement could replace a low-utilization full-time role. Define what success looks like, measure it carefully and scale what works while adjusting what doesn’t.

The Cost of Waiting on Agile Workforce Strategy

Organizations that engage with the shift to agile work now, with a genuine commitment to making it work for both sides, will be in a far stronger position than those who wait for it to be imposed on them. I made my own transition by choice, and that made all the difference in how I shaped it. The same is true for how you lead.

¹Indeed Survey with YouGov 2025, Total N=7,317 job seekers and 2,966 employers. Workforce Agility - Employers Fieldwork Dates: 18th July - 11th August 2025. Workforce Agility - Job Seekers Fieldwork Dates: 18th July - 5th August 2025.

Indeed provides this information as a courtesy to users of this site. Please note that we are not your recruiting or legal advisor, we are not responsible for the content of your job descriptions, and none of the information provided herein guarantees performance.
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Related Links 

Why Workforce Agility Has Moved From Experiment to Expectation

Tech Meets Talent: Inside a CIO’s HR Strategy

Employers Don’t Have a Pipeline Problem. They Have a Trust Problem.

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About the Author

James Watson is a cofounder of Exhibit B Partners, an organization providing fractional thought leadership expertise and services to B2B companies. 

Beforehand, Watson cofounded FT Longitude and served as COO, where he helped scale the company into a £10M+ thought leadership business, serving 100+ global clients and earning recognition in the FT1000, Inc 5000 and Leap 100 rankings. Over the last 20 years, he has helped build some of the most recognized thought leadership businesses in B2B at The Financial Times, The Economist Group, Longitude Research (now FT Longitude) and more.