Published on 3 Oct 2025
Many companies today rely on a mix of permanent staff, seasonal employees, part-timers, and temporary workers. Each group brings something important but also creates challenges when demand shifts.
At Coople, we group these different types of staff into what we call ‘workforce pools.’ Thinking in pools helps you organise teams, know who’s available, and respond quickly to changes. This structure makes it easier to reduce costs, plan faster, and adapt with confidence.
Every business relies on a mix of people to keep operations running smoothly. While there aren’t universal names for these groups, most organisations end up with similar categories. Understanding them makes it easier to see where extra support might be needed — and how structured pools can help.
Here’s a simple way to think about it:
These are your permanent employees - full-time or part-time - who handle day-to-day operations and hold key knowledge about your business. They provide stability and continuity but can’t cover every extra shift or sudden peak in demand.
Example: Your full-time retail staff manage daily store operations, but they won’t cover extra hours needed for a Black Friday sale.
Many businesses hire part-time, weekend, or seasonal workers to handle predictable spikes in demand. They add reliability to planning but aren’t flexible enough to respond to unexpected changes.
Example: Extra warehouse pickers for the holiday season keep orders moving without adding permanent headcount.
These are hourly or zero-hour workers on your payroll. They’re the first people you turn to for short-notice absences or unexpected busy periods. Because they’re already trained, they can step in quickly, though this pool is limited to the staff you employ directly.
Example: An hourly warehouse worker covers a shift when a colleague calls in sick.
What many customers think of as “agency workers” are what we call External Flexible Staff. These are trained, vetted, and available on demand - ideal for seasonal peaks, sudden surges, or large projects.
Example: Additional delivery drivers brought in during a sudden spike in online orders can help meet demand without long-term commitments.
Learn more about how Coople differs from traditional agencies.
Most businesses find managing external flexible staff messy. Temps and flexible workers are often booked through multiple agencies or tracked in spreadsheets, leading to duplicated admin, higher costs, and little visibility when planning shifts.
The Coople Flex Work Platform brings all your flexible workforce together in one place. Instead of jumping between systems, you can manage, schedule, and track every flexible worker quickly and efficiently.
Here’s how it works:
On top of these, the platform lets you create tailored pools. For example, you might want a pool of night-shift workers, or a group of people trained on specific equipment.
This flexibility makes it easy to shape pools around your exact business needs, not the other way around.
It’s easy to think of pools as just another way of labelling your workforce, but the real benefit comes from the visibility and control they create. When you know exactly who belongs to which pool, you can make better staffing decisions with less effort.
Pooling makes a difference in several ways:
In short, pools turn complexity into clarity making staffing more predictable, scalable, and cost-efficient.
Every business already works with different groups of staff, whether that’s permanent employees, seasonal hires, or temporary workers. What makes the difference is how clearly those groups are organised and how easily they can be managed.
That’s the idea behind workforce pools: putting structure around the people you rely on, so you can plan with confidence and adapt when things change.
Coople’s Flex Work platform doesn’t just show you the pools you already have - it gives you tools to build new ones, manage them all in one place, and expand into our wider network of Cooplers whenever you need. You start with the workers you know, add favourites who have proven themselves, and then tap into a broader pool of 500,000+ people when demand spikes.
If you’d like to see how pools could work for your business, our team would be happy to give you a closer look at the platform. Register now and watch the demo here.
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