Corporate employer

• Obvious reasons are:
  • You want an UltraFlexible additional workforce that you can turn on and off like a tap as requirements dictate
  • You need those workers to be flexible, reliable and offering good soft skills
  • Community relations is important to your organisation

By putting your muscle behind the market launch you could achieve these objectives very quickly. There may be other business needs supported by a launch:

• 
  Slivers-of-Time working is a new answer to problems of retention. You have experienced staff who can't stand the shifts? If they want to go, offer to buy their spare time back (subject to conditions of their redundancy.) This allows them to work for other employers as well and it gives you an increasingly flexible pool to draw on. You may even want to guarantee them a certain number of hours work a week? Your spending power in the new market could create something of lasting value to the local community.
• The TUC believe (Challenging Times report, Nov 2005) that 77% of UK employees have no flexibility in their employment contracts. One option open to thought-leading employers is to offer new hires a mix of part-time and Slivers-of-Time working. For example, they might have 15 regular hours a week then be able to sell whatever additional hours they wanted to a range of local employers with a commitment from you to spend a minimum £X a week on your inducted pool of local workers.
• We call this option being an Anchor Employer. You are providing a bedrock of weekly hours for someone who can then play the local market on top of that. It can work if your staffing needs are predictable but in short bursts, for instance cleaners who do a 3 hour shift every weekday. If you're about to hire a lot of staff on this basis you could think of using your spending to trigger the local Slivers-of-Time market and make that a key part of your proposition to recruits. This turns your work into a launchpad for a range of work experience.

• 
  If you have around £100,000 that could be spent on hours of local people in the next 12 months you can launch the local market. If that then expands to enable a range of people to work in all sorts of ways for a variety of businesses in the area you could have a significant PR coup.
• You will need to work with an agency willing to offer a Slivers-of-Time channel in your area. It could be one of your existing suppliers, who may need you to nudge them into offering this new service. Or you could find someone new. Contact us if you need help with that.