As any business knows, sales volumes can easily fluctuate throughout the year. Often times there are specific peaks and troughs that businesses map out in order to maximize their profit. How effective is temporary employment for your business?

Nevertheless, even after mapping historical sales trends to prepare for fluctuations, the bottom line is; change is unpredictable. Different trends can last anywhere from a few hours to months causing spikes in volume for both traffic and sales. For businesses this means that there is a need for additional staff, management, and money required to handle the fluctuation of sales volumes.

Having to manage high volume transaction processing can become a hassle, and often times companies do not have the necessary resources to benefit from this change. As a result more businesses are turning to outsourcing as a long term solution to this process.

Weighing the Cost of Temporary Employment

Josh Tolan of Fast Company breaks down what it actually means to hire a temporary employee. During the peaks of a business hiring additional employees becomes necessary to manage the increase in volume, but once the peak has ended you no longer need those extra hands around the workplace. Advertisement for temporary employment, hiring a temp agency, or even purchasing additional resources such as tools and equipment can easily rack up costs. While this may be ideal in the short span of a trend, often times, this model ends up being more cost over benefit.

Having to hire and train numerous temps may not be the most efficient process, which is why outsourcing can bring scalability for your processing needs.

Training is required each time a new seasonal or temporary employee is hired, and while some of them can be returning employees, often it is a new face unfamiliar with the work they will be tasked. In order to maximize productivity during a peak in volume the amount of training has to be quick, standardized, and efficient within a few sessions. This requires more staffing allocation than just hiring temps, an experienced employee is required to train and manage the newly hired crew pulling away from the already thin resources.

A common issue with temporary employment lies with reliability since the job that is given is for a short period of time. As with trends it is impossible to be able to predict when people get sick or need to call out. While this is an occurrence that naturally happens in the office, with temporary employees working during peaks it can easily become a crisis putting pressure on deadlines. This quickly becomes a red flag making the management process alone a full time job. Defeating the original purpose of hiring temporary employees in order to reduce the headache management, now your business is working away from the core competencies and must work harder to stay afloat.

The Outsourcing Approach

In order to avoid this management headache businesses have been turning to outsourcing to handle the fluctuation in volume.

The benefit of outsourcing this management to another company lies in their flexibility to handle both peaks and troughs. A trusted outsourcing company should have a vast pool of employees with various skills in order to manage different jobs and projects from different clients. This means that there is always a team prepared for fluctuating volumes which allows for 100% on time delivery, no matter the fluctuation.

What happens during a trough when volumes are low to nonexistent? That’s where the flexibility of outsourcing vendor partner is a huge value- add. There will always be a team who is fully trained for any volume, even if the work is only seasonal.

Nancy Jackson of Entrepreneur explains how some people starting out new businesses decided to outsourcing as a strategy for success. Companies such as SeatGeek or The Small Office Assistant wanted their businesses to grow, and have found that through outsourcing they were able to reduce working with management headaches and focus more on delegation and growth.

Working with the SLA of your company, success is delivered. In order to combat the possibility of people calling out or being out sick there is always an additional set of employees who are trained to fill in any open spots on the team. These benched team members are trained alongside the main team for efficiency so that they perform on the same level. This reduces the necessity for constant training of new employees, while also keeping reliability in check.

ARDEM Works to Deliver Success

ARDEM creates flexible solutions to best fit the needs of your business. We have over 15 years of experience providing outsourcing solutions to help manage any business headaches that may occur.

Want to know how other companies that partnered with ARDEM would rate our services? We have case studies from various businesses who felt customer satisfaction and communication were key in our partnership.

Contact ARDEM today to get more information on how we can help you!