Temporary workers aren’t just for the winter holidays. Your organization might experience a busy time during any season, or you may need extra hands on deck to handle special projects. Temporary workers can be valuable parts of you team if you treat them as such from the start.

Boost their contributions with these tactics:
•Training. Even a fast-track on-boarding program will give temporary workers an introduction to your products and processes. “At many retailers that I’ve worked for in the past, you just gave them a badge and off they went,” says Mark Tesseyman, managing director for the retailer Bonmarché in the United Kingdom.

• Bonuses. To ensure that workers don’t abandon the stores just when Bonmarché needs them, the retailer pays retention bonuses at the end of a busy season. You should include temporary staff in routine motivation efforts as well. “It’s about pumping them up,” says Dennis Reid, managing director of Retail Performance Specialists. “Give them daily targets in operations, customer service and sales. Give them product-knowledge quizzes.”

• Mentors. Pairing temporary staff members with your top performers creates a win-win environment. While learning the ropes, temps can take on responsibilities that would otherwise keep veterans from focusing on higher-level concerns.

– Adapted form “Here Today, Gone Tomorrow,” Liz Morrell, Retail Week

Boost morale and productivity by creating a system that allows colleagues to recognize one another. “Most human beings in the work environment rarely know what contribution they are making because no one ever tells them,” says Cary Cooper, a professor of organizational psychology at Lancaster University. Through peer recognition, they’ll be rewarded for work that you, as the manager, never see.

Set up your system with these guidelines:
   • Encourage participation. Make it easy for workers to nominate others for rewards, by telling the manager or filling out a form online. Or set up an employee committee to select nominees.

   • Know why they’re great. Require the workers submitting nominations to explain why their colleagues deserve rewards, and explain those qualifications to everyone when you present the award.

   • Make rewards fast and widespread. Reward employees as soon as they’ve acted in a way that merits recognition, and you reinforce that behavior. Also, don’t severely limit the number of people who can win or you will kill the motivation you seek to create.

– Adapted from “Cheer On Peer Plans,” David Woods, Employee Benefits,

Whatever your perspective, how you feel about 2011 at the end of next December will be affected by how you manage the year’s opportunities and deal with its hassles. To a real extent, much of that is in your own hands. However, you are also going to be affected by global mega-events and trends.

If you’re thoughtful and strategic, the odds are better that you’ll…Read full article

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