Top Five Priorities in Developing and Onboarding a Seasonal Staff
As we approach the months when some businesses begin hiring for seasonal staff, we turned to our experienced online training clients for their most valuable onboarding tips. Clients included a professional sports team, an amusement park, restaurant industry, and warehouse/manufacturing. As the country begins to re-open, online training is still the preferred method for many organizations who aren’t holding large in-person training sessions at this time. Online recruitment and onboarding are today’s solutions for your seasonal workforce.
Here are the five important components to get you started:
#1 – Effective training starts before onboarding, before hiring even. Pre-assessments during the recruitment stage are indicators of success. Assess personality, specific skills, E.I. (emotional intelligence), integrity, or even job knowledge. Because the cost of hiring the wrong individual is high, online pre-assessments during the recruitment stage are not only indicators of success – they help the bottom line.
#2 – Prioritize key outcomes. If every member of the team needs to understand important safety information, then make that priority number one. Ensure mastery and understanding of the knowledge that is most critical for customer and employee safety. Pay close attention to compliance and tracking. Revisit this training at regular intervals.
#3 – Temporary or seasonal workers do not have to know it all, but they need to know where to find the information or resources they may need. This is a great opportunity to incorporate online collaboration or mentoring/coaching programs, and to build a robust library of content and resources.
#4 – Re-engage. Young team members and first-time workers are understandably nervous but generally excited to take on their seasonal job. Grab their attention and engage them from day one of onboarding. But don’t forget – they have no past on which to base their experience and if they become disillusioned, they will leave. One Midwestern amusement park reports a 100 percent turn-over by July 4th. Use communication and feedback, friendly competitions, gamification/game-based learning, and public rewards and acknowledgements to reinforce your team’s value.
#5 – Simulated learning eases stress and reduces errors. Allowing for adequate training (better yet if it’s branded or certified training) will benefit your bottom line by producing more accurate and faster employee-client transactions. Simulations are an important component of a learning management system, and when they are adapted for mobile learning, these simulations allow you to optimize your learning content and environment.
Converting your existing training to engaging, online training or creating new courses from scratch is what we do best. Develop updated onboarding solutions today!