In April 2020, we were just beginning to understand the multitude of effects the pandemic had on business. We think back to our article from that month and how we proposed crowdsourcing as a way to augment business processing while dealing with shutdowns.
Now, in 2022, we’ve spent the last two years not only struggling to redefine “business as usual,” but also adjusting to the constant ebbs and flows of doing business amidst waves of Covid variants and other catastrophes and disasters.
But one prevalent issue, in particular, has only gotten worse: the talent shortage.
A problem augmented
Based on a recent study by Everest Group—a research firm focused on strategic IT, business services, engineering services, and sourcing—talent/skill shortage was ranked as the top business challenge going into 2022.
A talent shortage in both the business process outsourcing (BPO) and shared services center (SSC) industries has existed for years. And like every other lingering inefficiency, the pandemic has only exacerbated the problem. It’s gone from lack of a skilled talent pool to existing employees quarantined and out of the office.
For example, if you have in-house verification staff tackling a major amount of data, and suddenly they’re forced to quarantine or stay at home sick, what happens to your processes? Are you able to continue doing business as usual?
All organizations are contending with infection rates, quarantines, and a lack of consistently present team members. In other words—issues that wouldn’t be issues with a flexible solution and workforce.
What’s the talent shortage solution?
Even without the pandemic, talent shortage is a problem affecting many industries. And without a plan in place, the pandemic has only augmented the issue.
Has the time passed for forming a plan? Not necessarily.
Organizations should still put a business continuity plan in place. With the previous and current wealth of challenges, creating a plan with your pandemic-adapting experience may be beneficial—in the event another variant sweeps through.
During the worst of the Covid-19 pandemic, we saw that workers needn’t necessarily be sick to not be present in the workplace. During lockdowns, businesses from all industries were faced with immediately switching to a work-from-home model—with little to no experience doing so. This was an especially precarious situation for those that deal with sensitive customer data because letting employees access that data from outside the organization is a security threat.
In addition to a business continuity plan, it’s essential to find a way around relying solely on your own workforce. With a competitive environment, look for a solution that can ramp up quickly and scale.
Operate at full capacity and beyond
Meet any challenge with a flexible answer. ScaleHub’s crowdsourcing solution can help BPOs and SSCs navigate staffing difficulties with an offering that scales your capacity on-demand.
Our solution employs an approach to crowdsourcing called microtasking.
Microtasks are the smallest parts of larger tasks. Consider the tasks of validating data from a document or labeling images or videos. These seem easy enough for one employee to handle until he or she is entering document after document or labelling hundreds of images between other assignments, distractions, and breaks.
With microtasking, crowd contributors from all over the world key in a tiny part of the data in a document. When multiple crowd contributors are working on one document at the same time, it’s validated in seconds.
Or, create a secure, private crowd for your own workforce—something particularly useful when your team is quarantined and working from home.
With 2.3M global crowd contributors and AI that adapts to new insights, ScaleHub’s crowdsourcing solution taps the best of what technology and human oversight have to offer. Best of all, there’s no software to implement, making it a speedy, flexible add-on option in times of uncertainty.
Instead of adapting every time your team takes a hit, utilize the crowd, decentralize your data processing, and get back to functionality with ScaleHub.
Learn more
Does crowdsourcing sound right for your business continuity plan? Let’s talk, or check out more on our automated, scalable solutions here.
