- Onboarding
Keeping Your Holiday Employees On Staff Permanently? Here’s How To Onboard Them
If you’re one of the many businesses that staffed up to better serve your customers during the holiday rush, by now you’re probably working to make the transition back to your typical headcount.
And while that means many of your temporary holiday hires will soon be leaving your team, if you’re like most, likely there are a few of those temp hires you’ll want to offer permanent positions.
You aren’t alone — according to management consultancy Hay Group, as many as 40% of holiday hires will end up staying on as full-time staff.
For many, however, the transition from seasonal temp to full-time status can be turbulent. Temporary workers are often taught only the bare essentials when they’re brought on, but all too many organizations fail to go back and adequately train those 40% who stay with the company after the rush is over. Too many managers assume that a month of experience will have taught the newly-permanent members of the team everything they need to know — but that’s often just not true.
Challenge Your New Employee Onboarding To Go Further When Bringing Holiday Staff On Full-Time
We’ve written previously how onboarding part-time employees is a unique challenge. So too is the task of successfully integrating initially-temporary workers into your full-time culture.
You might feel like onboarding holiday workers is a bit redundant — after all, by now they’ve already met their teams and know the basics of their jobs. But there are still a few key pieces of information you likely won’t have included in your temp training that will be absolutely critical to the success of a full-time team member. A few ideas to consider:
Benefits Enrollment Training
At most organizations, temporary workers aren’t typically included in company benefit programs. Once you bring those employees on full-time, however, this information has an incredibly important role in the onboarding process and helps the newly permanent hire feel confident they are taken care of as part of the team.
Company Processes Training
Every business has its own unique combination of programs, processes, tools, and technologies for getting work done. Whether it’s showing how to use your HR software to file forms or request days off, how to find the company calendar and address list to schedule meetings, or how to access intranet tools like your VPN, CRM, or video CMS, a quick demonstration provides a helpful resource for your new hire.
Culture and Value Statements
Your corporate vision and mission statements are essential guideposts to who your company is, where you’re going, and how you’ll get there. You want to make sure these all-important guiding principles easier for your team to find, to see, to share, and most importantly, to remember. Video can be helpful here — Gartner Research has identified vision and mission onboarding video as one of the five greatest-opportunity, lowest-risk ways organizations should be using video.
Organizational Overviews
Many experts believe that interdepartmental training is key to the success of every employee, no matter what type of work they’re involved in. Larger companies, in particular, do well to make sure all employees both understand the bigger picture and how their own work supports that vision. Providing overviews of all that the company does and how each team, department, and business unit support the whole is a valuable way to get new hires invested in their roles.
Executive Welcome Messages
Often at first, newly-hired holiday workers don’t feel connected to their organization. One helpful way to encourage that connection is to share a welcome message from the CEO and members of the executive team. Insights from these leaders help humanize your corporate org chart and provide your new hires with a sense for the style of your leadership team.
Role Play and Coaching
Little time and lots of demand during the height of the holiday rush often means that temporary staff receives only the most basic employee training. As you bring those employees on, you’ll want to complete their training regimen, emphasize soft skills, and ensure your new hires approaching their now-permanent roles in the right way.
Video Helps Make Scaling New Employee Onboarding Easier
Of course, extending more detailed onboarding to new hires isn’t always practical for many organizations — especially if your new holiday hires are scattered across different offices, storefronts, or other locations. And that’s where video onboarding becomes a great tool for supplementing and scaling your traditional employee training programs.
On-demand video can be shared with new hires anytime, anywhere — even provided in a set sequential order so your HR team can rest assured every employee receives the same first-day experience.
Better still, video has proven to be both a valuable tool both for helping employees learn — and for saving their organizations on the cost of repeat training activities.
Research suggests eLearning can increase employees’ knowledge retention by 25% to 60%. Video appears to offer an extra boost as well — studies have shown that presentations that included visuals like video along with text were 9 percent more effective than text alone when comprehension was tested right away, but that it was 83 percent more effective when the test was delayed — implying an improved ability to remember the information better later.
From a cost perspective, meanwhile, IOMA reports that corporations save between 50% and 70% when they replace instructor-based training with eLearning. Microsoft famously has used video to cut classroom training costs by $303 per person, from $320 to just $17.
What Can Video Onboarding Teach Newly-Permanent Holiday Employees?
Almost anything— from how to use the technology they’ll see every day and how to enroll in your corporate benefits program, to how to live the company culture and work with the customers they’ll see in their local store or region.
Find out more in our free white paper, 15 Ways to Enhance Employee Onboarding With Video. In it, we detail how video can help improve employee onboarding, including:
- 15 kinds of onboarding videos to supplement your training program
- 5 capabilities your onboarding video platform needs to be successful
- How to develop an onboarding program that works