Many businesses plan to make holiday hires this season to support additional sales or increased traffic, set up/staff holiday-specific events, and more. Often, it can be tricky to determine which positions to staff temporarily and how to train those temp workers rapidly so they can launch right into work.
One of the best ways to rapidly train holiday hires is to build processes and procedures that they can use. Again, this can be tricky. The business system you’d like to document may only be used during the last two months of the year. This means that it should be dusted off and reviewed in advance.
Below, we will share how to build processes for this year’s holiday hires.
How to Build Processes for Holiday Hires
You can document your business systems in two ways so that holiday hires can be rapidly trained and brought up to speed.
1. This is the solution for temporarily staffing existing jobs as a support over the holidays (such as adding sales or shipping staff to existing teams).
The solution is to document existing processes used by the teams to which you will add temp workers.
This can be done by:
a. Getting your team onboard with process documentation.
You can do this by explaining that the documentation will cut down on temp worker’s questions and the time it takes to train them. Most workers want to get their work done. Many do not want to spend time also training new temporary employees.
b. Setting up an accessible place where the processes will “live.”
c. Working with your team to document critical processes.
d. Doing a run-through to ensure no steps are missing.
e. Ensuring that HR can access this documentation and add it to the initial training of temp employees hired to work in that department.
2. If your holiday hires will be doing something that only happens seasonally, take this opportunity to document the hiring/training process with the first few hires, then use that process documentation for the rest of your hires this year.
This can be done by:
a. Establishing an accessible place where you can document processes.
b. Getting involved in training the first few hires and documenting as you go.
c. Sketching out procedures based on past actions. For example, if you are holding a holiday festival, you can sketch out what needs to be done and how this work has been performed in the past.
d. Asking the holiday hires and one or two senior long-term staff to partner in documenting processes this year.
e. Documenting the processes through video, audio, written word, and images.
f. Doing a quick run-through with the team at the end of the holidays to ensure all of the processes are accurate for next year.
This may require you to keep some holiday hires on for an additional few days to ensure all documentation is accurate, but it will also cut down training time for next year.
Hiring over the holidays can be challenging, but getting your ducks in a row as early as possible can help you and your team overcome that challenge.
Need help with process documentation and establishing business systems? Contact the team at Business Success Consulting Group! We are your process experts.
