From the course: Managing Temporary and Contract Employees

Juggling temp and contract employees

From the course: Managing Temporary and Contract Employees

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Juggling temp and contract employees

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- The person you hire as a temporary or contract worker may have a day job at another organization. That's why it can be quite challenging to manage temporary and contract employees who work offsite, schedule their own hours, and have multiple priorities besides your company's. To juggle your time effectively, you have to be extremely detailed with your intentions, directions, and expectations. You need to deliberately practice excellent communication, engagement, and trust to boost morale when managing. You may already know this to be true with managing your full-time employees, but you should know it's especially true with gig workers. Think about it. They don't have the benefit of learning cultural and company nuances like your other employees who are at the office daily. Let's start with communication. You can never communicate enough, so make sure you schedule frequent conversations. If not in person, video is always better than a phone call because so much of what's communicated is nonverbal. There's two questions you can ask after every meeting to remove any assumptions on their part and yours. I am not sure what I said, so please tell me what you heard. Based on our discussion, what do you see as your essential priorities? You want to always remember to leverage talent while you have them. The challenge and opportunity is to engage your contractors in creative ways, because they often have a greater breadth of work experience they can impart to the benefit of your entire team. No matter how many creative and fulfilling projects you assign, temporary employees may not give you their full potential if they don't feel like they're a part of your team. If they're working on your team, they are also part of your team, so you want them to feel just as important as the rest of your staff. Gig workers, by the nature of the work, expect a high degree of autonomy, are paid by the task, project, assignment, or campaign. It's important they develop rapport quickly because of the short-term relationship with the reest of your team. Ensure you treat contractors as part of your organization by inviting them to staff meetings, events, and outings. Make the same resources available to them as you do your full-time staff. It's the small things that boost morale and align the entire team to your mission and values. When you do these things, your temporary employees will begin to feel like you care about them. And with that comes a lot of trust. Trust is earned over time. Another way you can build greater trust with temporary and contractors is opening access to your calendar. Finally, I recommend you create a process for providing recognition for achievement and exceptional work. Ensure that process with your temporary employees. These are interesting times for you to develop your leadership skills, to reduce the ambiguity of a permeable team. Remember, managers do things right, but leaders do the right things. It's not about managing activities, it's about delivering results, and excellent communication, engagement, and trust can motivate employees to deliver. It's definitely a juggling act, but one that builds a cohesive and inspired team.

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