What is a worker marketplace and how do they drive organisation success?
11 Feb 2022
The beginning of ‘open marketplaces’
There are the well known online marketplaces that enable buyers and sellers to trade goods, like ebay and those that allow people to trade in accommodation, such as airbnb or stayz. Of course, there are even crypto marketplaces where people can trade in currencies, not unlike trading shares on the Australian Stock exchange.
All of these examples are between buyers and sellers in an open marketplace, where anyone can create an account, participate and join in.
The advent of the ‘private marketplace’
A slight variation on this, is the closed or private marketplace, where users can create, or set up a group and invite, or have members join the group, before they are able to participate, exchange or trade. A so-called private marketplace.
This can be done by an individual, a local community interest group, but also by businesses.
One such example is a Melbourne bike store that set up a private marketplace for its customers to trade in secondhand bikes using the platform made available by Facebook. They now have over 30,000 members – buyers and sellers.
The rise of the worker marketplace
Digital labour marketplaces or worker marketplaces specialise in providing labour services between businesses or households seeking labour services and workers.
These marketplaces enable skilled and unskilled workers to trade their talents with other people, rather than products. Platforms facilitate these types of marketplaces, that you may be familiar with include fiverr and airtasker.
More specifically, in the ‘business to business’ market, individual professionals and businesses can trade their services using an online market place provider like upwork.
One critical differentiator in worker marketplaces, is that they can be ‘open’ like upwork and or, in the case of Emprevo facilitated worker marketplaces ‘private’. A private marketplace is one where the workers can be your own (casual / part-time / full time) or workers provided by your preferred agencies. And that you can add the workers and agencies to the one marketplace, making it super simple to manage the work allocations to each.
For example, a manager in an organisation can use Emprevo to create a worker marketplace. In this type of marketplace, a manager can offer shifts to workers, and workers can accept those shifts. And it happens in a closed, customised, private worker marketplace, often created and managed by the organisation’s shift managers or HR team.
Emprevo calls this product feature of marketplace capability Worker Connect . The benefit to both the managers and workers are the same as those of any marketplace and include efficiency, scale, optimisation, simplicity, control, and transparency.
What is really powerful is that the manager has control over who is offered the shifts and in what priority. With an Emprevo Worker Marketplace the manager can leverage Worker Connect to add thousands of their worker profiles, location, employment status and roles, to fill shifts, or to communicate a crisis, and or to check worker availability in real time.
Furthermore the manager can also leverage the Agency Connect feature. That is, the manager can add into the one “worker marketplace’ all of the preferred agency partners they have relationships with. This empowers the manager with a simple click / alert / reshare function, to send any unfilled shifts onto their agencies.
As a result the manager now has the ability to fully manage the offer of valuable work to those that will give them the best outcomes at the right time. That is, fill shifts fast, easily and at the least cost. Or, if required, communicate to workers, in real time, who are actually on site, a crisis that is happening. You can see who has seen the message and be certain about that.
Why the worker marketplace is loved by workers
Historically, organisations, and the companies that sell them solutions, focus solely on the head office. As a result the solutions take a ‘software first’ approach and fail to properly connect, or be usable for workers, leaving them feeling devalued and eventually disinterested.
Emprevo understood this insight and designed interfaces that work for both the manager and the workers. This means workers can simply download the native app to their device, and start accessing work straight away. They are matched to work opportunities based on their skills profile, availability preferences and can also see the shifts they have already taken. They can set notifications to ensure they get alerted immediately when new shifts become available, anytime day or night. Which shift workers particularly love.
As a result, 84% of workers are accessing their employers worker marketplace at least twice a day, every day. The workers are chasing the work, instead of the previous situation where managers were struggling and chasing workers to take work. All this means that shifts fill much faster than traditional methods of engaging workers such as calls, texts and emails, playing phone tag and being frustrated beyond belief.
The benefits of a worker marketplace are compelling
For managers the benefits of a worker marketplace are the same as all trading marketplaces. However, with your very own Emprevo worker marketplace you also get the the benefits of a platform that has been designed for optimial simplicity and worker engagement.
Universal benefits of a worker marketplace include:
- Efficiencies in speed and cost and time to offer your item (shifts) to the market
- Scale with the ability to manage 1 to 1000 items (shifts) in under a minute across multiple skills, locations and unlimited workers
- Simplicity with a central place and platform that is so easy for managers to use that it require little training, if any at all.
- Access to a 24 x 7 worker marketplace (platform) that can keep working when the manager has gone home and the night shift workers are up and looking for more work.
- Transparency and the ability to see shift status’, worker skills, worker availability, worker activity, worker engagement and more.
- Control and the ability to engage a single worker on a single shift, or hundreds of workers on thousands of shifts
- Increased Partnering capability with the power to add recruitment partners and agencies to the marketplace to further increase performance of the marketplace.
- Worker engagement increases as workers get more of the work they love, when and where they want it. This allows them to maximise income, reduce underemployment and manage personal demands, like children and or family.
And of course, as every day goes by, the benefits in cost savings, time saving, and efficiency are compounding. As are the benefits in worker engagement and employee satisfaction.
Even more reasons to love the way Emprevo Worker Marketplaces will work for you. If you would like to hear more, and or see a free demo then contact us.
