Benefits of Hiring Temp Workers During the Holiday Season

Difficult as it may be to believe, the holiday season is almost upon us again. But the retail industry isn’t the only field that gets crazy around the holidays. Demand tends to pick up this time of year in the world of manufacturing, often in a big way. As the holidays arrive, you’ll need to make sure your staffing levels are adequate to keep up until we’re through the New Year.  

In addition to increased demand, increased employee absenteeism around the holidays compounds the problem. According to data from the Society for Human Resource Management, around 72% of American businesses said their workers take unplanned time off around the holidays. More demand and less core staff to meet that demand mean you might have a real problem keeping up. Plus, we’re in a nationwide labor shortage at the moment, and many experts believe we’re on the brink of a recession – it’s safe to say the staffing shortages you face around the holidays could stick around well past this particular season.  

What are manufacturing employers to do? How can employers prevent a turnover tsunami?

The answer lies in hiring seasonal employees to meet the extra demand during the winter holiday season. Let’s take a closer look at the ins and outs of seasonal temporary staffing.  

What is a Seasonal Employee?

A seasonal employee is just what it sounds like: an employee hired to provide short-term assistance during a particularly busy time of year, like the holiday season. This person could be hired on a part-time or full-time basis; seasonal work is about the duration of the contract, not the amount of hours per day. 

Note that seasonal work doesn’t only refer to the holiday season. While your manufacturing operation may need extra help around the holiday season, there are also other times of year when businesses need that extra manpower. Some businesses need it during the busy summer months, especially when existing staff members are taking vacation time; others need it during the first months of the year. Whatever time of year is busiest for you, seasonal workers are there to help shore up your staffing needs.  

5 Reasons to Hire Seasonal Employees During the Holidays

The holiday season tends to be very busy for manufacturers. And hiring seasonal employees is the perfect way to offset the added need for workers. But what specific benefits does hiring seasonal help bring to your facility? 

Here are five benefits of hiring temporary workers during the holidays: 

Temporary Workers Boost Productivity

The first benefit of hiring temporary or seasonal workers is an obvious one: It maintains and even boosts productivity around your warehouse or manufacturing setting. More people to do the work equals more work completed, assuming your management team uses the people at their disposal strategically and effectively.  

When you’re dealing with a staff shortage, the employees you do have working on the floor are stretched thinner, and their stress level goes up. A stressed employee is not productive. By hiring extra seasonal employees for the holiday rush, you’re lowering those stress levels and boosting productivity across the board.  

Seasonal Workers Can Have Long-Term Potential

Here’s a benefit of seasonal workers that you might not have considered at first: If they do great work, you might be able to turn them into permanent employees. Many companies have found top performers by hiring on a temporary basis and then converting those temporary employees to permanent team members. In this way, hiring seasonal workers can serve as a kind of probationary period to evaluate an individual for work ethic, skills, and cultural fit. If it’s a great match between employee and employer, you may be able to bring them onto your roster for the long-term. 

Reduce Payroll Costs with Seasonal Employees

Bringing multiple workers onto your payroll for the holiday season really isn’t cost-effective for most manufacturing employers. Paying out salaries, as well as benefits, bonuses, and other perks, only to have demand decrease after the holidays and leave you with extra workers you don’t need, is not a smart business decision. But when you utilize temporary or seasonal workers, you avoid many of these costs.  

Temporary employees are often more cost-effective than permanent or long-term hires. Temp employees work on an hourly wage basis and don’t receive benefits or other perks paid by you. In fact, temporary employees aren’t on your payroll at all – they’re paid by the staffing agency that contracts them out to you. You’ll pay the agency’s fees, but that cost is going to be far lower than hiring multiple long-term employees for the holidays.  

Add Additional Expertise to Your Roster

Bringing on temporary employees during the holidays gives you the potential to expand the pool of knowledge and experience you draw from in your workforce. Temporary workers can bring new perspectives and skill sets to your workforce, whether it’s adding an entirely new set of skills or covering when a specialized permanent employee is out on holiday leave. It’s important to realize that adding temporary help isn’t just about covering skills gaps or ensuring production doesn’t fall behind – it can actually serve as a way to add knowledge, experience, and skills to your team that you didn’t have access to before.  

Increase Employee Morale with Seasonal Employees

The holiday season can be one of the most stressful times of year for your employees, both because of an increased workload and additional family responsibilities outside of work. Telling employees they can’t take time off to spend time with their families, or asking them to continually take on overtime hours, is a quick way to wear them down even further. And that will soon start to have a serious effect on morale around your facility.  

Covering staffing gaps for time off requests and adding additional help so existing employees don’t get overwhelmed is a great way to combat this. Bringing in temporary workers helps everyone – and it’s a fantastic way to make sure morale stays up as the holiday season progresses. 

Tips for Hiring Seasonal Warehouse Workers

We’ve learned about some of the great benefits of hiring seasonal workers to meet demand as we near the end of the year. But how exactly do you go about finding and hiring those individuals? It’s not as simple as putting out a few job listings and hoping for the best. You’ll need to stand apart from the competition in order to attract the best people.  

Here are a few tips for hiring seasonal employees this year: 

Offer Higher Wages During the Holiday Season

If your budget allows for it, offering higher wages during peak holiday season is a great incentive for manufacturing employees. Everyone could use a bit more money in their pockets during the holidays – if you’re able to offer more, you’ll be setting your organization apart from the pack. If a higher wage isn’t possible, you might consider sign-on bonuses or 90-day bonuses as another way to use pay to attract great workers.  

Advertise Flexible Schedules for Seasonal Employees

A measure of flexibility is built-in to the concept of seasonal employment; whether a worker wants to work full-time for a few months or they’re just looking for a few extra hours here and there, seasonal work gives them that option. And when you advertise this as the employer, you’re attracting more manufacturing candidates from a greater pool. Today’s workforce demands flexibility, and seasonal or temporary work is a fantastic way to provide it.  

Leverage a Warehouse Temp Agency

Another way to successfully hire seasonal workers as we enter the holiday season? Turn to a temp agency in Ohio or Michigan to help you find and hire the temporary workers you need to maintain productivity and cover staffing gaps. This way, you’ll save time and money you would otherwise spend on the recruiting process – and you’ll be able to rest assured you’re gaining talented, motivated manufacturing professionals to help bolster your staff this holiday season.  

Hire Seasonal Workers with The Advance Group

Are you looking to ramp up your manufacturing facility’s staffing as the holiday season gets closer? Whether you need to keep up with increased production, cover skills gaps, or fill in for seasonal absences, partnering with The Advance Group means you’ll find the talent you need, when you need it. We make finding and hiring temporary workers easy, and that means you meet the extra demand this time of year in a cost-effective and beneficial way.  

We offer temporary and temp-to-hire staffing services to help you meet the extra demand without adding to your permanent headcount. Whether you’re looking for temporary help for a few weeks or a few months or longer, we can help you source and hire the great people you need to remain productive and profitable during the busiest time of year in manufacturing. This holiday season, don’t get left behind – contact The Advance Group team to learn more and find out how our temp agencies in Ohio and Michigan can help. 

 

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