Imagine it’s the busiest month of the year and you can’t take on any more orders because your employees are maxed out with their workload. You’ve all had your fill of overtime and if anyone has to call out, you don’t know how you’ll make it through the week.
Hopefully by this point you’d have already started looking for ways to increase your headcount. But if you’ve waited until the middle of busy season, it’s going to be too little, too late for you to maximize the opportunity for your business.
At Veryable, we train businesses on how to use on-demand labor to build a labor pool so that they are prepared for busy seasons or any other changes in demand. We’ve seen companies get great results with this approach, so we’re highlighting the benefits your business could see from using on-demand labor to build a labor pool.
In this article, you’ll learn the benefits of a labor pool during your busy season and when you should start building one so that you can rely on it when the time comes.
Your labor pool allows you to scale rapidly and as often as you need to during your busy season. With it, you can grow the size of your workforce in a matter of days. Compared to other solutions for getting your headcount where you need it, like traditional staffing, on-demand labor is much faster and also gives you full control over who you work with.
When you have built your labor pool to the right size for your business, you can invite workers the day before you need them and receive enough bids to fill your needs.
When your busy season arrives, you never know just how busy it’s going to get. Matching your headcount to the work you need done is impossible to get right every single time. That’s where a labor pool works differently than other methods for matching capacity to demand.
A labor pool allows you to find out what your demand is, then immediately post the work you need done to workers who are ready to come to your aid as soon as the next day. With such a short lead time, you’ll be able to flex up and down precisely, without worrying whether you’re spending money on unproductive labor hours. A labor pool will be the best tool in your kit when busy season arrives because of this benefit alone.
Your labor pool consists of workers you’ve already worked with, so they are familiar with your operation and don’t need to be trained again. This saves you the time of trying to onboard new people in the middle of your busy season. Instead, you can invite from the pool of trained workers when you need them. Knowing that workers from your labor pool have experience in what they’re doing means one less thing to worry about during busy season.
After the dust has settled and you’re ready to get back to the regular course of business, you can reduce your headcount just as quickly as you increased it. Simply stop posting new opportunities, and just like that you’re back to your usual headcount. The best thing is, you still have all these trained workers in your labor pool and that means when demand suddenly increases again you can quickly flex your headcount back up at zero cost to scale.
In this video, business users from several different e-commerce businesses share how the Veryable solution has helped them take full advantage of peak season while cutting costs and improving service levels in the process.
For more on-demand labor success stories, click here.
You’ve already put thought into preparing for your busy season, or you wouldn’t be reading this article. When that time comes, you’ll want to focus all your energy on taking full advantage of the financial opportunity that the busy season presents to your business. That’s why you should know that it will take some time to build your labor pool to the size you will need for busy season. And there will be some trial and error in the process of identifying the reliable workers for when the going gets tough. But, if you stick with it and build your labor pool to the right size, you can see impressive results during your busy season.
So, it’s important to start building your labor pool now. When busy season comes, you can deploy this flexible extension of your workforce with confidence if you’ve taken the time to set yourself up for success.
To be extra certain you have a fully prepared labor pool in time for busy season, you’ll need to start building it a few months in advance. The timeline may vary, so we wrote a guide with examples of how quickly you can build a labor pool based on the size of your business.
To get started, take 5 minutes to create your free business profile. Our team of operational experts will reach out shortly after to answer any questions you have and ensure that your team is setup for success.
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