By | Taylor Haskings
How you manage your labor force is as crucial as it has ever been. This starts before your employees do, as it covers recruitment, hiring, and onboarding. However, it’s also crucial to keep morale high so productivity is good while they work for you. It also follows through with retention and keeping the right people for as long as you can. In every stage, you have to spend some money, but there’s always the possibility of saving and making even more.
6 Labor Force Techniques to Try in Your Business
Looking for labor force ideas to experiment with? Consider these!
- Outsourcing: Human resources, accounting, and IT are all areas where you might benefit from hiring out your work to industry specialists rather than flesh out a full internal team.
- Temp Staff: When you need help for your business, do you automatically boost your permanent payroll? Those are people you need to pay all year long, and if there are stretches where they don’t have much to do, boredom might settle in. Morale can suffer, and your bottom line won’t like all that bloat. Whenever possible, delegate work to seasonal employees, temp staff, and contractors.
- Comfortable Working Conditions: Anytime you get a chance to make changes to your office layout or create a new one, forget about the cubicle farms of yesteryear. Many of your professionals may be working with laptops instead of desktops, so they can move around and be leisurely. Indulge them. Modern office spaces may look more like your living room at home than corporate HQ.
- Flexible Hours: Certain positions need coverage during traditional banker’s hours, but that’s not the case for all of them. Some professionals honestly might work better at different hours. You can win on productivity and morale at the same time if you allow some flexibility.
- Remote Work: Remote work was something IT professionals got to enjoy to some degree before the pandemic. Now that nearly everyone has had a taste for it, they all want it to some degree. As much as possible, let your employees have a few days a week of it.
- Employee Referrals: Your own staff might be one of the most effective potential resources to lure in job candidates. They already know the company culture, and many of them likely know skilled professionals. Enticing them with referral bonuses or awards gives them financial incentive to bring in professionals who are likely to be just as good a match for the organization as they are.
Sector-Specific Insurance
While you might treat your full-timers to the standard insurance package that includes medical, vision, dental, and life policies, you might also want to look into sector-specific staffing insurance. This can work out well for independent contractors, especially in the areas of engineering and IT.
If you work with independent contractors, then it’s a good idea to require them to have business insurance before doing any consulting work for you. This doesn’t just help protect your business, as it also helps the contractors protect their livelihood and individual assets.
Increasing Retention
Boosting your retention rate is always a winner, and it helps you in many different ways. First of all, the longer people stay, the less often you have to spend thousands of dollars on hiring and training replacements.
Secondly, it means that your average employee will wind up with more years in your organization, and that gives truly veteran professionals who know what they’re doing.
Third, it means that team-building and bonds between your professionals have more time to grow for a deeper culture.
Forbes has good ideas on how to increase your company’s retention rates if you want to do so. They include paying your staff well, giving them opportunities for internal advancement, offering positive feedback on a regular basis, and also listening to them for their suggestions and ideas.
Everyone Wins
Practicing these labor force techniques can boost morale among your professionals and possibly even make your business a magnet for talent looking for the right place of employment. Productivity should rise as morale does, but you’ll also save tangible money on top of the subjective benefits.
