Your temporary employees are critical to the success of your operation. They have specific tasks to complete, and without their presence in the workplace, you’d be in a world of trouble. They fill in for key players who are out on leave and they help with essential short term projects that keep the company moving forward.
But because they don’t plan to stay onboard for long, temporary workers don’t always recognize how valuable they are. They don’t receive the personal appreciation they deserve, and they often don’t have time to develop a sense of camaraderie and earn the trust of their full-time coworkers. So what steps can you take to make them feel welcome and integral to the team? Try these simple moves.

Spread the hype.

Before a temporary employee arrives in the workplace, tell others of their pending arrival, and create some buzz. Highlight their accomplishments, brag for them a bit, and share some of their personal interests in order to lay the groundwork for future conversations. Generate a little excitement and make sure your employees are prepared for their arrival.

Encourage socializing.

If you have a temp filling in for an absent worker, don’t immediately break up chatter between the temp and the rest of the team. A little room for clowning and small talk can go a long way. Don’t rush through meetings or discourage break room banter. Just let it happen. While you’re at it, encourage the temp to settle in. They should be meeting everyone in the building, and everyone should be meeting them.

Let them know they’re valued.

If you have a team of temps coming in to complete a software implementation or move some items around in the warehouse for a few weeks, don’t let them glide in and out each day like ghosts. Tell them what they’re doing and why it matters to the overall success of the business, and let them know that their contributions are important. If you expect them to learn your name, learn theirs.

Push teams to intermingle.

Encourage your full-time permanent employees to make the first move, and during meetings or group sessions, push them not to gather exclusively among themselves. Encourage them to sit together, eat lunch together, and get to know each other.

Praise them publicly.

Sometime the best way to get current teams to take notice of the newbies and remember their names involves saying the names aloud and attaching the names to praise and approval.

For more on how to welcome your temporary employees to the team, reach out to the Fairfeld County staffing and management professionals at Merritt Staffing today!

Performance reviews have become a necessary evil in the white collar workplace. Nobody enjoys them, the consume valuable time, and by mid-year, any lessons they’ve imparted (on either side of the table) have usually been long forgotten. But year after year, eternally hopeful HR experts strive to reshape this process, believing that it CAN somehow be rendered meaningful and fulfill its promise as a critical management tool. There’s a reason for this eternal hope: reviews really are valuable. They allow managers and employees to connect on a personal level, and they provide structure for what might otherwise be a delicate and awkward conversation. Most employees want to know how they’re doing, and most managers want to tell them. This is just a difficult bridge to cross, and it rarely leads to genuine and lasting improvements in performance.

So if you’re struggling to get more value out of your review process, try this move for 2017: Reduce the formality of your meetings. If you relax the atmosphere, both parties will be more inclined to share honest and genuine feedback. Resentment will drop (on both sides), and self-editing will give way to real talk that can make a real difference.

Encouraging Informal Reviews

Ask your managers to spend a specific amount of time on each review. Encourage them to fall neither under nor over this amount. The upper limit should prevent managers from overthinking and overworking each word and metric in the review, and the lower limit should prevent them from blowing off the process entirely. Provide similar brackets for employees as they complete their self-evaluations.

Don’t schedule your meetings too far in advance or give them too much symbolic weight. Managers should simply block out one day (or two) for all of their reviews, and structure the day as they choose. Employees should not have to forego hours of work or miss key deadlines to accommodate this minor event.

Praise and encouragement should always take precedence over negative feedback, warnings and threats. Ratios should fall at 51/49 at the very least, even for employees who are in dire need of course correction.

Meetings should be cordial and professional, and they should provide employees with a chance to demonstrate their better natures. If they’re praised, their graceful receipt of the praise should be acknowledged. If they’re lectured, coached, or accused, they should be given an opportunity to tell their side of the story or suggest an action plan that works for them. No one should ever feel like a trapped animal or a scolded child during a review. At the same time, employees should never feel embarrassed or put on the spot by well-intended praise. The meeting should feel like an adult conversation, nothing more or less.

For more on how to navigate the delicate social currents of your company’s annual review process, reach out to the Connecticut staffing experts at Merritt.