Holiday season magnifies the challenges of onboarding newemployees. Businesses face increased pressure from an influx of customers,enormous volumes of orders or deliveries, or simply juggling regular workloadswhen many regular employees are away. Getting seasonal hires up to speed, fast,can help. Doug Stephen, senior vice president of the learning division at CGS,in New Brunswick, Canada, shared some best practices for creating what hecalled “guerrilla-style learning”—cost-effective, mobile-friendly eLearning.
Minimize, then contain, training
The best thing a company can do, according to Stephen, is notraining—by rehiring from previous years. “If you can retain even a small amountof those that have been successful the year before, you’re going to maintain orincrease customer service, the cost is going to be less, and you’re going tohave more stability in the workforce.”
Of course, it’s unlikely that a company can retain a fullcomplement of seasonal hires from year to year. Conceding the necessity oftraining some new hires, Stephen emphasizes the key to efficient training ofpeople who will be around for only a couple of months: planning. “It’sbest to contain the training,” he said. “And once you contain the training, tosimplify it.” Planning allows a company—of any size—to prioritize and train onlyessential skills.
Turn top-performing employees into video stars
Stephen’s solution enlists valued permanent employees—andeveryone benefits. “Take a look at your top regular performers that are doing what theseasonal people will be doing. Find out from them what are the ‘gotchas’ in thework that need to be addressed. Because you can’t teach seasonal employeeseverything,” he said.
Once crucial skills and topics are identified, those topperformers “teach” the new hires—informally. “We decide what is importantbefore we do this kind of ‘guerrilla-type learning,’” Stephen said. “We usemobile devices, and we create little tiny vignettes, under two minutes. We caneither have [the selected employees] do a selfie and explain, or they can havea manager film them while they’re talking about it.”
The resulting short videos become tips and training for newseasonal hires—“the mechanisms and the methods to find out what they need toknow to be able to do the job best.” As an example, Stephen described workingwith a home goods store, a chain with about $800 million in annual sales.Employees recorded vignettes on topics like how to properly fold a small rugfor a floor display, after-hours procedures for ensuring that the stores werepristine and organized for opening, and the correct way to process customerreturns.
“We take our best person or best people to explain the keyto being successful,” Stephen said. “We take that information and post it on aYouTube channel.” The vignettes, tagged and categorized, are available onYouTube where new hires can search by scenario, task, and job role.
“There is still that human interaction, but we extend it outinto the digital space so that people can learn it,” Stephen said. Thissolution “proves to be very cost-effective, and you can move very quickly aswell. You don’t have to be able to set up plans to put it into the LMS andSCORM it. You just create a YouTube channel and put it up there. And it’sreally effective.”
It’s a low-cost solution that any company can implementeasily. “This can be a poor man’s option or a rich man’s option that can getthe same results,” Stephen said.
It’s also scalable. “Name me a small company that doesn’thave an iPhone,” Stephen said. Any company can do this; the key is planning.“The issue is, even small companies need to take the time to prepare” and focusonly on the most essential tasks and skills. And keep it short. “If it’s morethan two minutes, we lose them.”
Engaging top-performing permanent employees has anadditional bonus: “People love that. People want to be recognized as someonewho is valuable to the organization. What better way to do that than to go hometo your family and say, ‘The manager asked me to help the new people. And oh,by the way, let’s go to YouTube and take a look at what I’m doing,’” Stephensaid. “You’re bringing in valued regular employees and really giving them kudosand something to be proud of; they’ve been selected to impart their skills toothers. It’s very empowering within an organization.”
Employees or contractors?
Some seasonal or temporary hires are employees; others maybe freelancers or contractors. The difference is legally significant; whenproviding training, employers must be careful not to treat contractors orfreelancers like employees. In some locales, requiring or even providingcomprehensive training, or requiring employees to perform specific tasks indefined ways, can cross that line.
For this reason, Stephen advises posting the videos to apublic YouTube channel. “We can create a private area and we can provide usernames and passwords to contractors if we wish,” he said. But “if you want tomake it public, the advantage to that is it could help you if you bring in aperson as a contractor.”
With a public YouTube channel, the vignettes become “tipsthat anyone in the world can view,” and contractors can access them using theirown devices, on their own time. That can help establish that those individualsare not employees.
Look at new sources of seasonal workers
Cast a wide net when looking for those seasonal hires, Stephenadvises. “We all have a tendency to look to students, to try to bring them in.Expand it, and look at some fantastic people who might be retirees who wouldalso be interested—and you might have more stability there as well,” Stephensaid, since more of the retirees might return year after year. “There’s a pool [ofpeople] that are willing and just as able to do that type of seasonal work.”
Or consider staffing through an agency: A staffing agencycan take on some of the training burden, screening temporary hires for neededskills and providing needed eLearning and training. “I have found that astaffing agency can be very effective in terms of pre-screening the candidates,administering safety training and assessment tests, etc.,” said Melanie Kim, astaffing consultant at AppleOne in California. Some agencies handle payroll aswell. “There is, of course, a higher cost associated with temporary services versusfinding the employees on their own. However, many companies find the time theysave on qualifying and onboarding candidates is worth the additional cost,” Kimsaid.
Remember: It’s a two-way street
Posting short tips or training to YouTube works for allhires: seasonal employees or contractors; students or retirees. “Everyone goesto YouTube, believe it or not,” Stephen said. “If not, you can show them. Theyounger people just go there first. The others might say, ‘Where’s thebooklet?’ But once you show them, and they see a real example instead ofreading it, everybody embraces it. It’s a video world now; it’s all video.”
And once they’re on board, keep new seasonal hires engaged: Ask forfeedback and show appreciation. If the new hires feel welcomed and as if theyare a part of a bigger effort, they’ll engage more with both the training andthe work. Once the season ends, Stephen advises investing a small amount ofeffort to stay connected using a Facebook page or other social media. When thenext hiring season rolls around, reach out to previous hires and consider usingincentives to get top performers to come back, Stephen suggests. That will takeyou full circle, back to his first suggestion: Minimize and contain training!
