Sometimes your most valuable employees are not the ones that put in 40 plus hours a week, but those that put in 20 hours a week. Part time staff can be awesome and if you target part timers you can often find a wealth of people with great skills and experience who want to focus a bit more on the life half of work-life balance.
But, employers often worry that a part time person won’t be as invested as a full time person. And what about temporary employees that may just be working on a project and then leaving? What things can you do to motivate and engage employees that aren’t with you all the time and might just be staying a few months?
Sirmara Campbell Twohill, Chief Human Resources Officer at LaSalle Network, a Chicago-based staffing and recruiting firm gave me 5 tips for engaging and managing part-time and temporary staff:
To read Sirmara’s ideas, click here: 5 Ways to Get Full Time Engagement From Part Time Staff
Many employers could benefit from applying these strategies to their full-time employees.
The biggest one for temps is the part about treating them like company employees except of course for the payroll/benefits/etc that the Temp agency takes care of.
This means things like if you give feedback to the employees give it to the temps. I once worked for a large banking concern as a temp. They gave statistics printouts to all the company people and ignored us until we finally said we’d like to have some clue if we’re meeting your standards. It never occurred to them to give us the same information for the same job.
Also they had a lovely party where they brought around baked goods on a cart and gave people company mugs. Except for the temps. We couldn’t eat their food and we certainly didn’t qualify to get any branded swag. We were full time and most of us had already been there over a year (they kept contract extending us.) This is NOT a way to get people to care about your company. It was petty and stupid.
Well, the truth be told – the best way to get “contractors” to care about your company is to make them employees with all the “perks” that you give to others.
Short change me on my compensation – then don’t expect me to contribute as if I am part of “the family.” You don’t pay me for that!
I just left a temp job. This company hires everyone (even the HR recruiter that did my onboarding) as a temp. Some were there for 3+ years, as temps. Yet they expected full-time regular behavior, with low pay and no benefits. Not a great environment. Lots of employees with low morale. Who wants to work hard for no recognition, no chance of a raise, or promotion?
Needing a source of income, I took a temp job at a local community college where employees salaries were paid for by the state – a mash-up of two of the worst kinds of bureaucracies. A culture where temps were treated as indentured servants, sadly, by lazy, insular full-time staff with a fraction of both your education and work ethic. I had to eventually leave without another job lined up in the interest of saving both my declining self-esteem and IQ.
Creating an on-boarding program is a great way to get part-time employees or otherwise engaged from the get-go. It gives them the opportunity to feel fully involved and appreciated despite their lower amount of hours. I thought you might be interested in checking out WorkStride, a new software platform that powers employee engagement and performance programs across the enterprise, motivating and rewarding the people needed to drive tomorrow’s growth. You can request a demo here: http://go.workstride.com/learnmore
Offering website service to part time employees can increase engagement. It will help them to stay motivated and healthy which is definitely good for an organization. We offer wellness service to corporate clients and we studied the difference after adopting wellness service in output. You can find more information what a complete package can be you can visit https://thewellnesscorner.com/