Description of What is Staff on Demand?

The term “Staff on Demand” (SoD) is only about a decade old, but the idea is hardly new. Rather, it dates back to the beginning of the last century. In a nutshell, it refers to the practice of retaining an external pool of human resources with the ability to add and subtract more staff as needed. A classic example is the temp agency, which contracted out independent workers—typically clerks and other non-professionals—to corporate clients for temporary (hence the name) duties.

A second notable precursor of SoD is Hollywood movie productions. Studios would draw upon the large professional community of camera operators, sound technicians, electricians, etc. to staff individual films, sometimes on location. As such, these productions can be considered the first example of what are now called “virtual corporations.”

But there have always been “temp” workers in the corporate world. The difference with Staff on Demand is that:

• It is a profession. Today’s gig workers don’t see themselves as taking on temporary work as a way to earn a living between full-time jobs. Rather, a surprising percentage say this type of work is their career.

• It is valuable. Traditional temp work typically consisted of per-hour jobs that required little (filing) or specialized (typing) training or expertise. SoD jobs can include traditionally professional positions that can rise to the top of the organization chart.

• It has its own infrastructure. Micro-payments, individual health insurance, remote work tools—an entire safety net has emerged to support gig workers and overcome the historic obstacles to temporary and contract work. The result is a work environment that can be as good, if not better, than a full-time job, even before we factor in the unequaled level of freedom for workers. These benefits will increasingly draw the best and brightest to move to SoD roles for their own careers—and for companies to increasingly draw upon these resources.

Some of today’s SoD platforms include: 

• TaskRabbit: Local repair and odd jobs as a service. As a measure of its success, TaskRabbit has been acquired by Ikea (e.g., “Build my Ikea furniture,” “Help me move”).

• Amazon Mechanical Turk (MTurk): A micro-task platform for information-gathering and data-processing tasks

• Upwork (the merger of Desk + elance): A global marketplace for freelancers

• Gigwalk: A marketplace to contract micro-tasks to distributed, local workforces (e.g., “Check the placement of an item on a shelf in all the Walmarts in your area, and take a picture of each.”)

• Fiverr: An Israeli online marketplace for listing and applying for small, one-off jobs.

• Molly Maid: The oldest service on this list, a 500+ franchise home-cleaning service 

• Kaggle: A community of data scientists solving “challenges” and “competitions” provided by enterprises 

• 99Designs: A competitive freelancer platform for graphic design 

• MBO Partners: For larger companies, MBO manages all your contractors in areas like payroll, background checks, on-boarding, off-boarding and training

Staff on Demand is the present and future of work: Between 2005 and 2015, 94% of new jobs created were in the gig economy, (1) enabled by—among other things—technological breakthroughs, new legislation that protects gig workers, and the rise of an online global marketplace that enables companies to hire from anywhere on the planet. For example, in 2020, there were more than 3 million app-based gig workers in Mexico and an estimated 12 million across Latin America. Fifty-eight million freelancers work in the United States, contributing more than $1.4 trillion to the national economy. Not surprisingly, freelancing is predicted to become the US majority workforce by 2027. SoD exemplifies the new Zeitgeist of the sharing economy, crowdsourcing, and the shift of power to ordinary people (the “Army of Davids”) over big business, Big Media, and Big Government. An obvious example is OpenAI beating the mighty Google to the punch with Chat GPT, but there are many others.

All these forces converge to make possible what co-author Mike Malone calls the “Protean Corporation”: an enterprise with a small, solid core of long-serving full-time employees who preserve the company’s culture and purpose, surrounded by a cloud of on-demand contract staffers with different skills.

The result, which structurally resembles the modern image of an atom, would show the company as a shapeshifter: highly capable, able to quickly wax and wane in size with the vagaries of the market, and able to nimbly reorganize and take off in pursuit of new business opportunities.

But, Malone warns, a Protean Corporation will succeed only if the organization has powerful training tools to quickly build gig-worker loyalty and understanding of the company culture—as well as precise and efficient recruitment, hiring, and payment systems.

Probably no company in the last decade has leveraged SoD as well as the ride-sharing success story Uber. Indeed, Uber is synonymous with Staff on Demand. Uber likely wouldn’t work if it was a full-employment company. If it were, Uber would have an estimated 5 million employees and be the largest employer on the planet.

Needless to say, Uber initially had a brilliant MTP. “Everyone’s Private Driver” is simple and short—and nebulous enough to eventually allow for everything from airplanes to personal helicopters. It’s easy to focus on the second and third words of Uber’s MTP: that the company provides users with private chauffeurs. In fact, the most important word may be the first. “Everyone” commits the company to make its service available to anyone who wants to use it everywhere. That may seem an impossible goal, but that’s the point of MTP, isn’t it? And the use of Staff on Demand enables Uber to reach every small neighborhood on the planet.

As most readers know, there are downsides both to Uber’s business model and its practices: price surge pricing, lack of transparency, insurance issues, and tensions surrounding the employment status of its drivers. But there’s no denying the pervasive breadth and depth of the company’s success.

There also is no denying that the success of Uber has stirred economic, legal, and legislative tension around the world. Indeed, the rapid dominance of Uber in hired transportation across the planet, supplanting full-time employees (taxi drivers in particular) with “gig” workers, has forced a re-think of the social contract between workers and employers. That debate is just beginning.

(1) The State of the Gig Economy