As a staffing platform that has operated in multiple industries throughout this pandemic, we’ve witnessed first hand the importance of health in this new world and the effort and commitment it takes to keep people safe.
Six months into the COVID-19 crisis, it has become obvious that the focus on health and safety will outlast this pandemic and will be a critical component of the new normal. At Instawork, we acknowledged this fact early on, as it was immediately impacting our partners and professionals. We worked to implement stopgaps quickly, while investing the time to listen to our customers to build an effective health and safety program. We are proud to announce that with the launch of this program, we have made ‘health and safety’ the #1 priority on the platform.
We have already seen examples of this health and safety toolkit creating positive impact for our partners and professionals. Our reliable staffing solution is serving the needs of multiple partners while allowing our professionals to earn bread at the time of this crisis. We worked closely with one of our partners, EXE Logistics, to scale their warehouse workforce in Texas and Tennessee. Another case in point is our partner, Bay Area online grocery Farmstead who grew their warehouse operations 10x overnight using Instawork.
We're happy to report that neither partner has had a single health incident, even in the height of the pandemic. What follows is a behind the scenes story of how we set out to build this health and safety toolkit in the middle of a pandemic.
As a platform that matches thousands of businesses with professionals, we were uniquely positioned to understand the challenges that the pandemic presented to both sides of our platform. On the partner side, we engaged with our hospitality community through multiple conversations hosted by Instawork, National Association of Catering and Events, and International Catering Association. For businesses still operating, our sales and account management team engaged closely to understand the challenges they were working through in the moment.
We identified that availability of staff and health and safety measures at the venue would be the two key factors that will help drive their business to normalcy. We also realized that many businesses were hesitant about using temp workers because of the additional risk of infecting their own employees. While at first glance, limiting the size of your workforce sounds like the right thing to do, we’ve seen it counterproductive to the business. If a business limits the number of workers, it assumes an even higher economic risk as the chances of one or more of their employees gets infected outside the workplace is the same as anyone else.
Instead, it’s important that you hold your staffing partners accountable for the same standards that you implement with your own workforce.
On the other side of our platform, our community operations and product team spent countless hours keeping in touch with our professionals to support and understand their needs. Despite employment challenges, most of our professionals told us that health and safety measures at the venue would be the single most important factor for them to pick up any job going forward. They were as anxious about working at a new venue as the businesses were about hiring temp workers.
The key function of a marketplace like ours is to build trust and reduce information asymmetry between its participants. When we took a step back and digested the above information, we realized that the needs of our partners and professionals were intrinsically tied to each other and it was our duty as a platform to facilitate this. This was a very obvious problem that we as a marketplace were best positioned to solve.
At Instawork, we always build our products under certain guiding principles that we agree upon beforehand. When we set out to make an effective health and safety toolkit we let the below principles guide us towards the right solution
Based on the feedback of our professionals, expert guidance, and processes with our partners in real-time, we built a health and safety toolkit to make it easier to comply with these best practices, and thus keep everyone safer. Below are a few salient aspects of this health and safety toolkit
It’s a saying we’ve seen everywhere lately, but it’s the underpinning to making this program work. By building these features into the Instawork app, we not only want to show that we are committed to Health & Safety, but we also want our partners and professionals to realize that we are all part of the same community. In order to succeed, the entire community (partners, professionals and Instawork) will have to come together and appreciate the importance of being honest. We expect both partners as well as professionals to be absolutely honest with us and with each other for this ecosystem to keep functioning.
We are confident that using the above health and safety toolkit, our professionals and partners will come together thriving on the other side of this pandemic.