To get the very best performance from your temporary staff or your contingent workforce, you need to make sure to include them wherever and whenever possible. If you want their best contribution you have to make them feel like they’re part of the team.

Here are three things you can do to make sure your temporary or contingent workforce feels like first-class citizens.

First, make sure that your temporary or contingent workforce is included in all meetings possible. Make sure that they know that you’re including them so that they understand what you want done, what’s important, and what’s going on. If you want them to perform like they’re part of the team, include them in team meetings.

Second, make sure that your temporary or contingent workers are included in lunch meetings and any other special events where employees are called together. Leaving them off of the invitation list creates a gap between these workers and your full-time employees. That gap can make your temporary and contingent workers fell like second-class citizens.

Finally, make sure to include these workers in training. We’ve already talked about how building their skills can make your assignment more attractive. It also ensures that your temporary employees know how to best generate the results that you need them from them. This helps to close the gap between a first-class and a second-class citizen.

One the most powerful ways you can ensure your temporary contingent workforce performs like you need them to is to make sure that they’re treated like they’re an important part of your team. Treat them like first-class citizens.

They start by thanking their employees for choosing to accept the assignment with their company. We had one client that made it part of their process to thank their temporary workforce at the start of their assignment and at the end of each shift. These actions helped to reduce their turnover by 50%.

Our employers with the lowest turnover also thank their temporary workforce at the end of each week. We don’t believe that this is a natural occurrence (although for some of our clients it probably is). Our clients that express their appreciation are very intentional about it. They go out of their way to make time to say thank you, to be grateful, and to be appreciative of their temporary or contingent workers.

It’s important to feel that you belong. It’s important to feel that you are part of a team. And it’s important to be appreciated for the contribution that you make, even if it’s just a thank you or a sincere expression of gratitude at the end of the shift or at the end of the week.

One of the best ways you can improve the performance of your temporary or contingent workforce is to improve their skills. There are two powerful reasons that helping your temporary or contingent workforce improve their skills is so valuable.

Improving Their Performance Improves Yours

By training, coaching, and developing your temporary or contingent workforce, you improve the skills they bring to the tasks and outcomes you need them to achieve while they are working for you. The more competency they gain in doing the work you need them to do, the better their performance. That’s good for you.

But there’s another equally important reason to improve their skills: their future value.

Improving Their Future Value Improves Your Assignment

Employees are simply more engaged when they are learning or improving their skills. Especially if those skills improve their future market value. Our experience is that employees who are given an opportunity to improve themselves and the value that they create take the jobs seriously, work to develop new skills, produce better results, and are generally more engaged in their work.

The investment in training, coaching, and developing employees is a good trade for the increased performance you gain from doing so. It also makes your assignment more attractive—especially if the employee can tout their newfound skills on their resume and leverage them for a better future assignment or fulltime job.

Whenever and wherever possible, offer growth opportunities in the way of training, coaching, and development to your temporary or contingent workforce.

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Much of what we have written up to this point has been about how to make sure that your temporary or contingent workforce is prepared to do their best work. But just like you find performance gaps in your fulltime workforce—even when you to great lengths to prepare them—you can sometimes still find performance gaps with your temporary or contingent employees. Some companies feel that it’s best to cancel underperforming employees and start over. But this isn’t always the best case, nor should it be. We find that you produce the best results when you counsel employees before you cancel them.

Clear Goals, Outcomes, and Accountabilities

Sometimes the reason an employee doesn’t perform up to your expectations is that they don’t really understand them as well as they need to. Counseling your temporary or contingent employees provides you with an opportunity to clear up any misunderstandings about their goals and your desired outcomes. Counseling gives the employee an opportunity to change what they’re doing and a fair opportunity to improve.

Some employees run headlong into issues that prevent them from doing the very best work. They might have an attendance or tardiness problem, for example. This doesn’t always mean they need replaced. They might have lost their childcare, or their spouse may have had a work schedule change. These are the kinds of problems that can be easily resolved. You can give the employee time to make new arrangements for childcare, temporarily adjust their hours, or make some other changes that prevents you losing an otherwise valuable employee.

When the problem is one that can be solved, counseling the employee is often a better path to increased performance than replacing the employee and starting over from scratch.

Last Resort

None of this means that there won’t be times when you won’t have to cancel a temporary or contingent worker. There are simply some people who don’t work out—regardless of how much you do to prepare them for their assignment. There will always be cases where you have to cancel an employee, just like there will always be cases where you have to release a full time employee. But we find when the issue can be resolved the best results are gained by counseling the employee before canceling.

We often ask ourselves this question: “How would I want this person to be treated if they were a member of my immediate family?”

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One of the most important ways you can improve the results you produce through your temporary or contingent workforce is by providing them with feedback.

Your company is different. The way you do things is likely different than the way some other companies in your space do the very same work. You also have different expectations of certain jobs and certain roles. Just because an employee has worked in the same industry or in the same role doesn’t mean that they really understand what that means inside your company.

Every day we get orders that sound like this, “I need an administrative assistant for one of our executives.” We appreciate the order, but it doesn’t tell us much about the job–or the right person for that job. The words “administrative assistant” means different things inside different companies. For some our clients, that person is responsible for making travel arrangements. For another one of our clients, an administrative specialist might need to know how to setup pivot tables in Microsoft Excel. This is a simple example of where the job title means different things to different people. And sometimes the expectations can be different, too.

The production expectations from one company to another can also be very different. In some companies, employee may be required to do more of one task than another. Or in some cases, they may not even be required to do a task that fell under the same title at another company. It can be confusing for the employee. But you can help clear up any confusion by giving them feedback.

If the employee isn’t meeting your production goals, then giving them feedback on how they’re doing–and how they can improve–can help them make the changes necessary to reach your goals. If they’re spending too much time (or too little time) working on the tasks or producing the outcomes you need, then giving them feedback can help them know where to place their efforts.

One of the best ways to help your temporary employees help you produce the results for which you hired them is to make sure that they have the knowledge they need to do their job.

We run a survey we call the Assignment Adjustment survey. It has only a few questions, but they’re designed to help us measure employee engagement. Without fail, when we ask our employees to tell us the one thing that would help them perform better, the most frequent answer is: “Give me someone to go to when I need help.” This answer is closely followed by “Give me additional training.”

The questions that we ask on this survey are open-ended prompts. Our employees aren’t choosing from a list of possible answers. The question is answered a lot of ways, but the underlying need is the same. That’s why we believe it’s so compelling. And so important to improving results.

Most of the time, employers hire a temporary or contingent worker, give them a quick introduction to the company, a quick description of what they need done, and then they leave them to their work.

One of the best ways to make improvements here is to assign a person to mentor your temporary or contingent employee. Before you run away frightened by the word “mentor,” let me explain what that might mean. Your assigned full time mentor is to simply a fulltime employee your temporary employees can go to when they have questions. When they don’t know how to do something, or when they don’t know what choices are available to them, a fulltime employee who knows the ropes can answer their questions. Their “mentor” can also check up on the employee to make sure that they aren’t struggling, that they have what they need, and to make sure that they don’t need additional training or knowledge about how to do the job to which they’ve been assigned.

Giving your temporary or contingent workforce a person to go to when they need help improves their performance. It also improves their engagement in their work. It doesn’t cost much in the way of time or effort, but it produces outsized results for the small of investment of giving them someone to go to.

This is part four in our series How to Get the Most from Your Temporary Workforce. (Here are part one and part two and part three)

Remember what your first day on the new job was like? Do you remember what it felt like not knowing anyone, not knowing where anything was, and not knowing what was expected of you? You were excited, no doubt. But that excitement came with some nervous energy, too.

It can be stressful to start a new job. The more warm, welcoming, and professional you can make a new employee’s start, the better they perform.

A Small Investment of Time for an Outsized Return

A little time invested in employees at the start of their employment produces greater results over the long-term.

One way to get better results from your temporary or contingent workforce is to make certain that you’re on-boarding process is warm and welcoming. The more you do on the front end to bring the person onboard in a way that makes them confident and comfortable in their new role, the better they perform.

It can be difficult to find time to welcome an employee into your business. There is work that needs done. You hired this employee because you need someone working now, not later. When an employee shows up for work, we’re anxious to get them producing. But the drive for speed can make it more uncomfortable for a new employee, more stressful, and more likely that they struggle.

Spending a few minutes introducing a new employee to the other employees on their team, explaining the expectations of their new position, giving them a tour of your facility, and answering their questions can bring them into the environment in a way that’s welcoming, reduces stress, and improves their productivity.

A Mile in Their Shoes

Think about when you started your job. Was it stressful that you didn’t know anyone? Would you have appreciated that someone welcomed you and made sure you were introduced the people you needed to know? Heck, did you even know where the bathrooms were?

If you were starting a new job, what would make the experience warm, welcoming and stress-free for you? Answering this question can help you build an onboarding process improves likelihood your temporary or contingent workforce is productive even faster. A little bit of time on the front end produces much greater results longer-term.

Make sure your onboarding process is warm and welcoming.

One of the biggest mistakes that we see our clients make when it comes to getting the most of their staffing dollar is underinvesting in the results they need. They pay less than they need to pay to acquire the employees with the skills and talents they need, and in the long run, end up paying more! But they don’t make this mistake because that is their intention.

When our clients make the mistake of paying too low for the results they need, it normally starts like this. They start by looking at their own wage and thinking, “If we pay a full time employee $15 hourly for this position, we’ll pay the staffing firm $15 hourly for this position. If we decide to hire the person, we’ll give them a big raise when we bring them on.”

The real problem is that if it takes $15 to attract and acquire a person with the skills you need, paying less than that doesn’t get you the candidate you really need. It gets you less. If you pay $10, you get a candidate that commands $10.

More still, we don’t think you should think of your cost savings from utilizing temporary staffing from paying the lower wage. In reality, a fully-loaded employee with benefits costs more than the temporary employee and their markup, and the benefit in cost savings is found in using a flexible workforce approach, like lower overhead costs, and faster recruiting times.

Our advice to our clients is to pay what you need to pay to get the results that you really need. Paying less than you need and saving a little money often costs more in lost production, manager’s time, poor results, absences, turnover, and other difficult to capture soft costs. But even those these soft costs are harder to capture, they are every bit as real as the hard costs you pay in wages.

To get the most for your temporary staffing dollar, pay what you need to pay. This doesn’t mean pay more than you need to pay, but it does mean you should pay for the results you need.

The Contract

There is a contract between the temporary employee and the company to which they are assigned. Some of that agreement may be written, but a lot of it isn’t captured in writing. The parts of the agreement that aren’t written and aren’t spoken are where we can run into trouble. Let’s see if any of these ideas resonate.

Do you believe that your temporary employees should have the same commitment to your assignment as your full time employees have to their job?

Do you believe that your attendance policies for your temporary employees should exactly mirror the policies that you have in place for your full time employees?

Do believe your temporary employees should treat their assignment like full time, lifetime employment?

Don’t mistake these questions as our going soft on you. We are perhaps the most demanding of staffing firms when it comes to setting expectations and holding our employees accountable. But our experience is that the contract between the temporary employee and the company there assigned to is usually out of balance. Nudging that agreement back into line produces a major improvement in the results of using a flexible workforce model.

Back Into Alignment

Because we aren’t offering temporary employees the same commitment we offer full time employees, it’s unreasonable to expect them to make a greater commitment to us than we are to them.

Your temporary workforce may not have earned time off for sick days, vacation days, or personal days, but they are still going to have ill children that need to be taken to the doctor, car problems, and all of the other problems life can sometimes throw your way. Understanding and making reasonable accommodations can help nudge your agreement back into alignment and improve your employee value proposition.

Your commitment to your temporary workforce may be to employ them for as long as you have the work available, and sometimes you can’t commit to how long that will be. Their commitment to you may be to work for you as long as they are available. Just as you might end their assignment with or without notice as your needs change, they might end their assignment or take another position. Parting on good terms leaves the door open for you to reacquire the temporary employee later, if and when you need them again.

We have countless examples of the contract between temporary employee and the company to whom they are assigned. And we have just as many examples of the contracts being more closely aligned. Our experience is that the more equitable the agreement, the better the results.

What makes your temporary assignment attractive to the employees you need? Why would a temporary employee choose your open position instead of another open position somewhere else?

Admittedly, these aren’t easy questions to answer. In fact, they can be difficult questions to answer even when you are hiring full time employees. But the better your answers to these two questions, the better the candidates you can expect. And the better the employee, the better your performance.

Here are a few factors to consider.

Pay Rate

One of the leading factors in choosing to take an assignment is the pay rate. A pay rate that is too low—or low in comparison to similar positions—isn’t attractive to the employees you may need. Pay is the first factor for many employees, and it’s a major component of your employee value proposition.

Even though pay isn’t the only factor to consider when looking at your employee value proposition, it does have to be considered. It can make a major difference in your employee value proposition. We recommend to our clients that when their starting pay rate doesn’t add much to their employee value proposition, they can boost the value by working hard to focus on the other critical areas.

Schedules

Most of us operate our business based on the demands of our customers and clients. But as the world has changed over the last few decades, our schedules don’t line up neatly with the schedules that our employees want or need. Our traditional schedules and our scheduling around our clients make it difficult for many employees—especially families where both parents work and where childcare is needed.

More attractive schedules can contribute to a better employee value proposition. If you have the ability to create more flexible—or more appealing–schedules, you can improve your value proposition for talented employees for whom scheduling and work-life balance is important.

Work Environment

When you think of your work environment, you might think of the actual workspace, the building that you occupy. But that’s your external environment. It counts, but when we think about the employee value proposition, we think about the internal environment. We think about how people are treated within your four walls.

Is your work environment friendly? Do you welcome people into that environment and give them a nice work experience?

It’s likely that you have more control over your work environment than you do over your pay rate or your work schedule. Employees want to work someplace where their work is appreciated. They value work where people are generally nice, and where they are treated well, particularly new workers and temporary employees.

How you treat people can be part of a very competitive value proposition. It’s something that you can exercise more control over. It’s also the little investments in treating people well that produce outsized results when it comes to creating a great work environment.

To get the most of your temporary workforce, start by defining your employee value proposition.