Now that it’s half way through 2024, it may be time to reevaluate your business strategies. And you should not overlook your staffing strategy. This guide will help you to evaluate your current staffing solutions and explore new possible strategies.
1. Assess Your Current Staffing Needs
Staffing needs rise and fall–what started as a workable solution might not be the best solution for where your business is now. It’s time to analyze your workforce requirements.
Consider when your business’s peak and off-peak periods are. If you are a warehouse or fulfillment center, you might have peak periods at the beginning of every month or during certain times of the year. Are you in need of constant use of temporary workers or do you need a few extra workers during busy periods?
Once you assess when you need temporary workers, identify the skill sets needed for your various projects. Is your current strategy providing you with the skilled temporary labor you need?
Then look at how well your current strategy is meeting your needs. You could look at metrics like ramp up time, meaning how long it takes to get the number or workers you need. You could also look at retention and fill rates. Your staffing solution should result in workers who show up and keep showing up.
Your staffing should meet your satisfaction levels. If you are unnecessarily struggling to get the amount of workers you need, then your strategy is not meeting your satisfaction levels. When staffing is satisfactory productivity goes up and headaches go down.
Once you know your needs and expectations you can measure those against your current staffing situation.
2. Measure Flexibility
Flexibility is an uncompromisable staffing need. Assess how quickly you can scale your staffing numbers up or down and how much control you have over your numbers. Do you control your call number or do you need to contact a rep to ramp your numbers up or down? What if you had a large number of orders come in over the weekend and you needed to get caught up tomorrow?
Your staffing solution should match your peak periods and staffing needs. You should have temporary workers when you need them and not have to worry about using temporary workers when you don’t. If you have a contract that dictates how many workers you get and how long you keep them, it may be time to find another solution that gives you the control.
3. Evaluate Efficiency
Track and measure how fast it takes to fill your shifts. If you are using a staffing agency, it may take a few weeks to get shifts filled. With staffing apps, like Bacon, shifts get filled within 5 minutes.
You should also look at cost effectiveness. Traditional staffing agencies charge a fee onto the workers wages that can reach up to 75%. Staffing agencies also commonly have fees for temp-to-hire candidates that can be expensive.
Staffing apps also charge a fee on the workers’ wages, but Bacon’s fees are a set rate of 36% so you always know what your cost will be. Bacon also charges no fee for temp-to-hire.
You should get the right amount of temporary workers for the right cost. If you are consistently struggling to get the right number, or any number, of temporary workers it’s a sign you need to try something new.
User experience plays a role in evaluating efficiency too. Temporary staffing agencies can be easy to use as the majority of the work is taken care of by the agency rep.
But, with a middleman there can be a loss of communication between the business and the workers, creating confusion and lack of accountability. Staffing apps remove the middleman and give the business direct communication to the workers.
Efficiency also means plans for when things go wrong. With staffing strategies that means the quality of customer support matters. Look into how responsive your temporary staffing solution is. Check out if you are able to contact someone, a real someone preferable, quickly and in multiple ways.
4. Compare Staffing Solutions
Once you have evaluated your strategy, and have decided to see new solutions, there are two main solutions to look into. These are traditional staffing agencies and staffing apps.
Traditional staffing agencies are the old way of doing temporary staffing. With these staffing agencies, often called temp agencies, businesses sign a contract to receive a certain number of workers for a certain amount of time. The agency then goes and conducts interviews or background checks on their pool of workers and supplies them to the businesses.
Temp agencies are a good choice for businesses who want to offload all the work and responsibility of finding temporary workers. They however have drawbacks, the fees can be very expensive and there is little accountability placed on the workers and it is more than common for temp workers to not work hard or just not show up at all.
Staffing apps, sometimes called gig work apps, are the new way of doing temporary staffing. With Bacon, businesses have complete control, they post the shifts they need, the amount of workers they want, the wages they will pay and skill requirements the workers need to have. Bacon workers then choose the shifts they are interested in working and apply.
Businesses can view the workers that apply, check out workers ratings and reviews, and choose who they want to work. Bacon utilizes backup workers to insure that shifts get filled and a 5 star rating system keeps workers accountable for the work they do. Bacon also has customer support reps dedicated to each business using Bacon. Ensuring quick and helpful support to whatever problems arise.
5. Implement and Monitor Changes
The last step is to try out and monitor your new staffing solution. Set up KPIs to measure the effectiveness of the solution you choose. By setting goals and measuring progress to those goals you will be able to evaluate if your staffing strategy is meeting the flexibility needs for your business.
