Even if you don’t have a business where volumes fluctuate significantly, it’s still worth considering adding at least a layer of flexible workers into your distribution center or warehouse operations, says Alex Vinden, general manager, light industrial, at Instawork, a flexible work app that connects businesses with hourly workers. That’s because you’ll simply tap into a larger potential pool of workers. 

Flexible work — whether in terms of hours or commitment — is here to stay. Today, one in three workers work in a flexible way, compared to one in six Americans in 2022, according to Instawork. Demographics mean that number will only increase, as currently nearly 54% of the flexible workforce in the U.S. is made up of people aged between 18 and 34, who prefer flexibility. It’s not just age that’s a factor, either. For the U.S. economy as a whole, 76.5% of workers identify their race as White, while 18.8% identify as Hispanic or Latino, 12.8% as Black or African American, and 6.9% as Asian. In comparison, in Instawork’s 2025 “State of the Flexible Workforce’” report, 41.8% of workers identified as Black or African American. Including single race and multi race, 31.5% identified as Hispanic or Latino. These are growing demographic groups.

It looks like flexible working is not something you can ignore if you want to stay ahead of the growing pressures brought on by rising costs, uncertain forecasting and the struggle to retain valued workers. In Instawork’s 2024 study “The State of Warehouse Labor,” they found that 43% of companies with warehouse and distribution facilities had lost revenue because of staffing shortages, and that was an improvement from 2023, when it was 66%.

“All the elements point to a much tougher labor situation,” said Vinden at a March 19 presentation at the ProMat 2025 conference in Chicago, entitled, “Data-Driven Workforce Strategies: Leveraging Flexible Labor in Warehousing.”

Traditionally, operators of warehousing or distribution facilities have tended to take a two-tiered approach to combining long-term staff with flexible or temporary workers. The latter are mostly brought in to supplement a solid base of long-term or permanent employees, in order to help with short-term needs such as seasonal events or social-media-driven spikes in demand. Those temporary workers are often one-time hires and don’t get much training. Usually, they’re getting paid more than salaried or permanent staff, and they’re less productive.

Vinden’s advice is to instead adopt a three-tier approach to staffing, where you have both short-term hires and permanent workers, but in the middle there’s a layer of recurring, flexible workers. Generally, flexible workers get the same hourly rate of pay as short-term hires, but since they’re recurring staff, you can train them, and they are therefore almost as productive as long-term workers, according to Instawork’s detailed data analysis of the workers and employers who use its platform.

Another advantage is that flexible workers tend to be better educated and more tech-savvy than casual hires. In the Instawork 2024 survey, 59.8% of flexible workers said they had taken some college classes or have earned a degree (it was 68% in 2022), and nearly 65% of flexible workers described themselves as “very comfortable” in using technology. 

Further, fostering a flexible workforce tends to improve retention. “A layered approach gives you access to more workers, and you improve retention because workers don’t have to leave to gain flexibility,” said Vinden.