Keeping your manufacturing and warehouse teams fully staffed during the holiday hustle can be challenging. You want to accommodate your staff members’ needs for time off while reaching company goals.
Maintaining your team’s staffing needs while onboarding, training, and deploying new hires during the holidays can be stressful. Fortunately, you can take steps to overcome these challenges. These suggestions can help.
Choose among these methods to keep your manufacturing and warehouse teams fully staffed during the holiday hustle.
Forecast Your Staffing Needs
Use historical data for sales and orders to predict this season’s activity and make educated decisions about your staffing needs. Focusing on order cycle time, fulfillment accuracy rate, and on-time ready-to-ship performance data can help determine the staff you need to meet key performance indicators (KPIs).
Review Staff Compensation
Ensure you provide competitive income and benefits for your manufacturing and warehouse teams. Because you are competing against other companies that need to hire holiday staff, you must make it worthwhile for current and potential staff members to work for your facility. Consider benchmarking your staff members’ wages against other manufacturing firms, warehouses, and opportunities for seasonal staff in your area, then respond accordingly.
Accelerate Your Hiring Process
Find ways to make faster decisions during your hiring process. The more efficiently you bring aboard qualified staff, the better you can maintain production schedules and reach company targets.
For instance, use an applicant tracking system (ATS) to review online applications and conduct virtual interviews. Also, make hiring decisions as quickly as possible to increase the likelihood of hiring the best staff.
Update Your Onboarding and Training Processes
Develop onboarding and training processes to help temporary staff members quickly begin producing. Helping temporary staff acclimate to your culture and training on specific job tasks supports maximum productivity.
For instance, include safety training in your onboarding process. Also, have managers reinforce safety protocols as new hires work. Additionally, pair an experienced staff member with a temporary staff member to train, answer questions, and provide guidance.
Prioritize Employee Engagement and Retention
Emphasize employee engagement, job satisfaction, and morale to maintain your manufacturing and warehouse retention rates. Because the workload intensifies during the holiday season, your employees require additional motivation to continue to perform their tasks.
For instance, set clear expectations for work schedules, performance, and requests off. Also, provide additional small breaks from the physically demanding work.
Take Advantage of Flexible Staffing Solutions
Work with a local staffing agency that specializes in manufacturing and warehouse workers. The agency can match you with temporary staff members for as long as needed.
The staffing agency already interviewed, tested, screened, and qualified the temporary staff. As a result, these skilled workers are ready to begin producing in a short amount of time.
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