In the modern economy, many companies are saving money and gaining productivity by bringing in seasonal or part-time workers. It just makes good business sense to employ people only when you need them and to save the money during slower times of the year. It’s also a great way to audition them for full-time employment; if they really do a great job in a temporary role, they might be worth calling when you’re hiring permanently.
Of course, there are logistical complexities to having part-time and temporary workers, and particularly when your company is just starting to use this model, you need to be very attentive to these extra considerations.
Many companies have put this logistical headache aside by utilizing popular services. It can gather a wide variety of workplace tasks into an automated system that streamlines and accelerates functions for workers and facilities.
But before we get too far into how to manage the problems associated with part-time and seasonal workers, let’s review some of those issues.
Working Hours
When the company is populated only by a modest number of full-time people, it can be fairly simple to track working hours. Someone’s timesheet that adds up incorrectly will probably catch the attention of payroll staff, and a correction will be made.
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But what happens when the warehouse is full of seasonal workers, some working 16 hours a week, some 22, some 18…? There’s no way to know whether their submissions are accurate, so a modern payroll input like Asure is critical to making sure that no one gets shorted on payday.
This is especially important with personnel working offsite, whose work-related computer functions can help to establish the correct working hours.
Facility Utilization
For those who are not offsite, facilities are one of the hardest areas to show flexibility. Because an existing facility can’t expand overnight to accommodate a dozen new workers, it’s incredibly important to make the most of your existing space. Even over the long term, it’s not cost-effective to add a lot of square footage that must be paid for, heated, and maintained year-round to keep it available for seasonal use.
One of the unique features of Asure is that it helps you coordinate use of facility space. You can schedule meetings so that the correct people are on the clock on the correct day, and then you can track workspace availability to be sure that the group will have somewhere to go. This prevents the constant rescheduling that can result from failure to find overlapping work hours, as well as the expense of adding unneeded workspace.
Atmosphere
This is one situation where your reputation should precede you. People looking for jobs will do a sort of thumbnail assessment of those who are hiring. If they think they know something about an employer, they will make a decision about whether to apply (or at least, whether to accept an offer) based on that.
Is your company known to be well-disciplined, organized, efficient? Do your existing employees talk positively about the workplace?
Sometimes when a company can’t seem to get quality people to apply, they do the wrong sort of self-examination, looking at things like wages or perks when they should instead be trying to figure out how to get consistent performance from supervisors or a better system for handling inventory.
When you’ve established a solid reputation as a place where qualified workers want to go, you will see better people applying, and you’ll have better productivity. And when you properly manage those workers, the same will be true.
The ability to expand and contract rapidly with a changing workload is critical to keeping a company lean and mean in an ever-more challenging global economy. When that expansion includes temporary or seasonal staff, you have to be just as measured in managing them, or else you’ll end up snowed under in the avalanche of unfamiliar faces.
