Staffing solutions for today’s climate

Hiring freezes and downsizing often becomes the pervasive managerial practice in today's current climate. However, while the pain of hiring freezes and downsizing-related layoffs can’t be avoided entirely, they can be mitigated.

With labour often amongst the biggest line item on your P&L, ways on how you can minimize that expense is by supplementing staff with trained temporary personnel to sustain production and/or service demands.

Below are cost control strategies you can put into practice to achieve staff efficiency during hiring freezes and downsizing pressures:

Convert Fixed Cost to Variable:
Analyse your workload and determine which processes can be handled by temporary staff. Reduce core staff to levels necessary to maintain normal operations. To continue meeting production/service levels use temporary staff to process work over several days versus hiring temporary personnel impromptu.

Eliminate Overtime:
Using temporary employees in place of overtime can reduce labour costs by 20% or more.

Reduce Training Costs:
Cut training costs and improve quality and productivity by employing skilled temporary employees. Save time and money on qualifying whether or not the temporary employee can perform the task. 

Focus on core activity:
Being understaffed will lower the probability of a department meeting its productivity targets, which could have a cascading impact on other inter-related departments. Shift the administrative burden when you use temporary staff instead of direct hires - all costs associated with processing and administering payroll and benefits are transferred from your company to the staffing firm.

Avoid costs associated with burnout:
Many companies may take the concept of ‘lean thinking’ too far. Pushing full-time staff to produce more with few resources increases stress which leads to problems with quality, productivity, absenteeism and turnover. Take the pressure off by using temporary employees. The additional personnel will help your staff avoid burnout, reduce the cost of defects, avoid productivity losses and limit turnover expense.