Flexible Workers or Full-Time Employees? On Staffing Systems with a Blended Workforce

The rise of the blended workforce, which is identified as one of the top workplace trends in 2017, is prompting firms to re-evaluate their staffing strategies. A blended workforce melds, as a deliberate business strategy, contingent workers, e.g., independent contractors or freelancers, with permanent employees. In this paper, we study optimal staffing decisions in service systems with a blended workforce, in the context of a queueingtheoretic framework. Because part of the workforce is flexible, the number of servers in our queueing model is random. Since the staffing problem with a random number of servers is analytically intractable, we formulate two problem relaxations, demonstrate their accuracies in large systems by relying on an asymptotic, manyserver, mode of analysis, and make staffing recommendations for systems with a blended workforce. We demonstrate that staffing decisions in such systems are not straightforward. Indeed, we characterize how these decisions depend on three main factors: (i) the supply-side uncertainty of the flexible agent pool, (ii) operating costs in the system, and (iii) fluctuations in incoming customer demand, and show that it may or may not be cost-effective to staff a blended workforce, depending on the interplay between those factors.