Temporary employees are a necessity in a variety of industries from retail to utilities, and managers often grapple with the best way to use those employees effectively. Most importantly, managers want to know how to engage and excite temporary employees so that they produce solid work, even if they aren't there next month. Use these tips to engage your temporary employees and gain the most from their tenure at your business.
Prepare Permanent Staff
Engaging temporary employees needs to start before those employees even walk in the door. Permanent staff members play a vital role in engaging new employees. Your permanent staff need to help train and aid temporary employees, and if you don't have their buy-in, it can make for an uncomfortable workplace, lowering the engagement of all staff.
Prior to hiring temporary employees, have open discussions with staff about how these employees will be trained, how they will work, and how staff can aid their new co-workers while still fulfilling their daily tasks. By creating a dialog prior to hiring temporary staff, permanent employees can voice their concerns and management can address those concerns so everyone is excited and engaged.
Prioritize Onboarding
A great onboarding process with adequate training and education can get an employee excited about their new position. A bad onboarding process can create confusion and hesitation about their choice to switch positions. This is as true with permanent employees as it is with temporary employees and sometimes more so.
Hiring temporary employees who aren't given adequate time to train and learn about company culture can create in a fish-out-of-water scenario. They start a new job with no sense of how they fit in or how to interact with their coworkers. Even if it isn't as rigorous as permanent employee training, create an onboarding process that not only shows employees how to perform their job but how their job directly benefits and enhances the company's goals encourages engagement and satisfaction. Give them a sense of the workplace environment so they feel more at ease during their tenure at your workplace.
Create Benchmarks
Getting employees engaged requires more than just welcoming them into your workplace. It also requires challenging them in their daily work. Engaged employees understand that their tasks are vital to their company's mission and appreciate knowing that they have a part in their company's success. Creating engagement through benchmark and work goals is a simple but effective way to maximize the engagement of temporary employees. During training, give temporary employees quantifiable goals to achieve during their time with your business. Check in with employees frequently to discuss those goals and foster engagement.
Bring Them Back
It goes without saying that bringing the same temporary workers back year after year increases production and efficiency but did you know it also raises their engagement? Few employees like the training process. It can be challenging to not only learn a new skill but also struggle to fit into a new environment. Having the same familiar faces coming back year after year creates a sense of camaraderie that highly benefits employee engagement. Temporary employees become engaged through the company recognizing their hard work and permanent employees see a reduction in the "revolving door" of temporary employees, leading to less training and on-the-job questions so they can accomplish their own tasks.
Temporary employee engagement is every bit as important as permanent employee engagement. Creating a strong onboarding process that aligns temporary workers with company goals, preparing staff, and rehiring great temporary employees are just a few of the ways to help those employees feel engaged during their temporary stay.
