WorkMarket provides gig worker management platform to the coronavirus-crisis nonprofit Volunteer Surge

WorkMarket, an ADP company, is making its contract talent management and work assignment platform available to Volunteer Surge, which is helping out in the coronavirus crisis, according to a press release. Volunteer Surge is “a nonprofit initiative to recruit, train and surge 1 million healthcare workers into our system to support front-line doctors and nurses and to assist vulnerable populations during the national emergency.”

We’ll take a closer look at Volunteer Surge and WorkMarket, which is covered in Spend Matters’ SolutionMap ranking of Direct Sourcing of Workforce/Services technology.

Volunteer Surge

Dr. Sten Vermund, dean of the Yale School of Public Health (which is also participating in the initiative), said the healthcare system and key professionals are overwhelmed by the COVID-19 pandemic. “Task-shifting … can reduce the burden on our system and save lives by allowing scarce medical workers to focus on the more serious COVID-19 care operations while trained health care volunteers pick up other tasks,” Vermund said in the release.

Vetted volunteers will receive important COVID-19 training and can receive assignments in their local communities, or do health support work at home by phone, the release said. Qualified volunteers will be able to “support testing centers, homebound seniors, people with physical and intellectual disabilities, hospitals and vulnerable populations.”

Others will “perform triage care for cases unrelated to COVID-19, staff drive-through test sites, provide telephone health support to homebound seniors, support those with intellectual disabilities or take vital signs in tent triage care centers,” the release said. “Hospitals and local health departments will supply proper equipment and supervision to keep volunteers safe.”

To learn more about Volunteer Surge or register as a volunteer, visit the site here.

WorkMarket

WorkMarket, the press release notes, will “provide the software to organize and manage the volunteers and the assignments they accept, such as visiting homebound seniors or delivering meals.” Based on our coverage of WorkMarket over the years, we can confidently say that its platform capabilities are very well suited to the requirement.

These capabilities include:

• Executing onboarding and vetting of workers (including background checks and credentials management)
• Creating and populating talent pools or “labor clouds” (by types of workers, geographies, etc.); evaluating and curating the talent
• Assigning projects/tasks to workers and tracking their project work with a GPS-enabled mobile app that allows workers to manage profiles, proceed through evaluation and compliance steps, accept and perform assignments
• Managing granular data of many kinds (real-time work-in-progress, worker characteristics and utilization, schedule management, trends and trigger events, et al) and providing managers with a full suite of dashboards and reports

Theoretically, the entire platform and volunteer worker population could be managed by Volunteer Surge, while pandemic-burdened organizations can directly source workers from the platform talent pools of pre-vetted workers. But we need to learn more about how the worker sourcing process will be organized.

An emerging digital ecosystem

Apart from WorkMarket, other technology-based solution providers and other organizations will be supporting Volunteer Surge, the press release notes:

• Yale School of Public Health is assisting Cinematic Health Education with development of the Community Health Worker training course for COVID-19.
• Amazon Web Services powers the online training platform, enabling streaming of the video-rich training through its cloud computing services.
• Absorb LMS is providing an enterprise-grade system to host the Community Health Worker training course.
• LinkedIn will help recruit volunteers on its platform.
• Salesforce, through its Health Cloud, will connect volunteers with health departments and hospital systems, where they can support triage efforts and make patient follow-up calls.
• Rotary clubs across the United States are mobilizing their networks to help recruit volunteers to join the effort. Rotary brings together volunteer leaders dedicated to taking action to address the world’s most pressing humanitarian challenges.
• Association of Flight Attendants-CWA, AFL-CIO, under the leadership of International President Sara Nelson, is galvanizing volunteers from among their 50,000 flight attendants, aviation’s first responders, to answer the call.
• Wilson Sonsini Goodrich and Rosati P.C. and Lowenstein Sandler LLP are providing pro-bono legal services to Volunteer Surge.
• GoFundMe Charity is helping to develop a campaign to provide another way for the community to support this program. The vision is to fund volunteer stipends as they answer the call to help their communities.
• TV veteran Megyn Kelly is assisting with partnerships, strategy and media.
• Resilience Force, under the leadership of Saket Soni, is galvanizing thousands of unemployed workers to take up essential work on the ground in partnership with local mayors in cities.

Not only is Volunteer Surge an unprecedented initiative effort to rapidly mobilize, organize and deploy a large-scale volunteer workforce, it will also be an experiment in how various organizations can come together on the fly and “interwork” in a digital workforce ecosystem. Additionally, it will be an experiment in how established, complex, extended work streams and processes can be rapidly broken down into discrete components and reintegrated. As such, it may provide important lessons for how such ecosystems can be organized in the future.