On-demand staffing, the idea that companies can engage their staff only when they need them and where they need them, is poised for a breakout year in 2018.
Pioneered by Uber, refined by many technology-enabled staffing platforms, who provide on-demand services to consumers, the game is now shifting to where the real action is, corporate America. Imagine that you run a retail chain, and instead of relying on each store manager to add staff when your stores are busy, the system automatically sends out push notifications to staff based on sales by hour increases and that staff can be targeted by those with the highest employee rating, closest distance, and immediate availability to work?
Similar to the adoption of other new technologies, like smartphones, that consumers found first and then convinced corporate America to switch, on-demand staffing makes total sense to every business who calls and Uber car and says, wow, that was easy…what if I could call the workers for my business when I needed them like that?
Adoption of new enterprise technology requires that the buyers of that technology can understand the benefits of trying something new. They don’t care so much about how it works, just that it delivers benefits that are quantifiable and relatable.
So, why now? Now more than ever we have pressures on both the supply and demand side converging making for the tipping point in the speed of adoption, the magic moment of on-demand staffing.
- Millenials want to be their own boss, control their schedules and arrange their work lives, just like they do there personal lives, with apps on their smartphones.
- As the economy continues to grow and there are more jobs than workers, companies must adapt to how the labor force wants to work and provide more flexible work arrangements.
- Companies of all types, think large chain retailers, need to reinvent their business models, and optimize labor expenses while also providing personal service and more product expertise, think Apple stores, to compete with online and attract customers to stores.
- Smartphone technology and apps usage is now ubiquitous across all types of industries and work categories, previously these types of services only worked for IT folks or early adopters who worked at tech companies, but no more.
- Enterprise adoption of the cloud to manage all of their critical functions is near complete, remember when many companies used to say, “we will never put our financial data in the cloud.”, any CFO saying that now would be looking for a new job.
Cloud-based platforms have changed entire industries: Amazon, how we buy anything, Uber, Lyft, Via, how I get from here to there locally, and Expedia, how I book my vacation and business travel around the world.
This chart below shows the evolution of staffing models for corporate America, and how technology has become the driver of change. Previously, government regulations, labor cost optimization, globalization and other factors drove previous staffing model adoptions.
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