When it comes to onboarding seasonal workers, there are a number of unique challenges for us to think about.
Seasonal workers are brought in during the peak season when companies are already at their busiest. This means that there’s rarely time to observe niceties like training, with the peak season bringing forth numerous challenges for companies.
Perhaps the most pressing of all of these issues is that seasonal workers need to be onboarded more quickly, with little to no time to answer questions or to personalize their training for temporary workers in logistics.
In this article, we’re going to go beyond the logistical perspective and dive into streamlining onboarding for seasonal workers in logistics by taking a look at it from the workers’ point of view. But how?
Well, by understanding the challenges that are faced by seasonal workers during onboarding and introducing the how.fm onboarding platform as a solution, trainers can create a smoother and more engaging onboarding process.
That’s because how.fm’s user-friendly software is designed to make enhancing worker experience a breeze, allowing employers and managers to make sure that their seasonal workers feel supported and empowered from the start.
Understanding the Onboarding Challenges Faced by Seasonal Workers
Let’s take a closer look at simplifying the onboarding process and solving the challenges faced by seasonal workers during onboarding in logistics.
We’ll get started by addressing the challenges of onboarding seasonal workers and getting to know why they struggle with these challenges in the first place.
Limited Familiarity with the Company and Processes
The first and most obvious challenge is that seasonal workers come in blind. They rarely know much about the company and its processes, and even if they’ve worked there as a seasonal worker before, they often don’t remember as much as you might like them to.
Part of this comes down to the issues that we’re looking at today. If they’ve been onboarded before, it probably wasn’t too effective. If they’re new to the company, they likely feel apprehensive and uncertain.
When you bring seasonal workers into your company, they’ll be thrown in at the deep end. You’ll need them to quickly grasp company policies and procedures and to wrap their heads around job-specific tasks, and they’ll need to do this at the same time as tackling their workload.
Lack of Industry Experience
The second biggest problem that we see is that seasonal workers often lack industry experience. They’re the proverbial jack of all trades and master of none. This goes for all industries, but it’s a particular challenge when they come into the logistics industry, which requires certain skills that are non-transferable from other industries.
The challenge for these seasonal workers, then, is to quickly acquire knowledge that’s specific to the industry they’re working in. This is a huge challenge, and one that it’s difficult for companies to combat.
And the companies that do the best job of overcoming this are empowering seasonal workers with comprehensive onboarding.
Language Barriers
Seasonal workers come in all sorts of shapes and sizes, and there’s no guarantee that they’ll speak the same language as the rest of your workforce. Even when they do, it may be as a second or third language, and so they might struggle to understand slang or pop culture references.
This is difficult enough for them in social settings, but it’s even more difficult when it comes to technical documentation and written briefings. Work instructions are rarely translated into all of the required languages. This leaves seasonal workers struggling to understand the tasks and processes.
That’s why it’s so important to use a tool or platform like how.fm. It supports localization and makes it easier for you to provide your seasonal workers with instructions that they can understand.
Simplifying Onboarding for Seasonal Workers
The next question, then: what we can do to make sure that we’re enhancing worker experience during onboarding. The good news is that there’s a platform out there that’s designed to help you with exactly that.
Introducing how.fm as a Supportive Onboarding Platform
how.fm is specifically designed for addressing challenges of onboarding seasonal workers in the logistics industry. And it does this in a number of different ways.
how.fm’s automated onboarding allows you to:
- Deliver a consistent, high-quality onboarding journey
- Provide materials to workers in over 30 languages
- Cut costs while boosting safety and regulatory compliance
- Make sure that you provide all of the essential information
- Free up time across your company
When done well, this brings a number of advantages to your seasonal workforce, including:
- The ability to hit the ground running and to do better work from the outset
- Greater knowledge of your company’s history, mission and policies
- The option to review information at any time
- The ability to focus on what’s most important to them
- Increased efficacy and engagement in the workplace
- Longer stays at your company because they can see the impact that their work is having
Another of the benefits of simplifying onboarding process for temporary workers with how.fm is that as well as having a user-friendly interface and being specifically designed for promoting engagement in seasonal worker onboarding, how.fm also has a ton of accessible training resources. You can take a look at all of those right here.
Benefits for Seasonal Workers
Deploying how.fm is one of the best ways there is of supporting seasonal workers through interactive onboarding. We’ve already taken a look at some of the challenges that seasonal workers face, and how.fm is ideal for addressing them.
For example, it can get your new hires up to speed much faster thanks to its interactive video training, allowing you to quickly make seasonal workers familiar with both your company and the processes that it uses. You can give them the lowdown on the industry you work in, too.
Deploying how.fm has earned a reputation as one of the best strategies for smoother onboarding of seasonal workers thanks to its self-paced learning and engaging training modules. Your seasonal workers can progress through the modules at their own pace, which is ideal because no two workers learn at the same speed.
Empowering Seasonal Workers
how.fm is built on a simple principle – that of empowering seasonal workers by providing comprehensive and easily accessible information. One of the key benefits of how.fm is that it can be accessed via any device.
By preparing seasonal workers for peak season logistics, companies can develop more empowered workers and improve productivity. It’s a win/win situation for everyone.
There’s a reason why how.fm has been used to onboard over 10,000 workers. It leads to a 75% increase in efficiency within the first two weeks, while new hires feel better prepared and have a clearer understanding of their job as a result of it.
Strategies to Ease Onboarding for Seasonal Workers
Now that you know a little more about how.fm and how it can help you to ease onboarding for your workers, let’s take a look at three further strategies that can help.
1. Pre-Onboarding Support
The idea of pre-onboarding support is to provide your seasonal workers with materials ahead of their actual onboarding. As soon as you know that someone’s going to join your company as a seasonal worker, you should be looking for ways to support them.
This typically means providing them with instructional videos, documents and other resources that are designed to bring them up to speed with your company before they ever step through the doors. The goal is to be able to familiarize those seasonal workers with your company, its processes and its quirks.
If you can do that before they start, your pre-onboarding means that most of your actual onboarding will already be done. If you’re hiring seasonal workers through an agency, speak to the agency about setting up a pre-onboarding session for the workers who are going to join your company.
2. Interactive and Hands-On Training
Whether you use how.fm or not, you’ll want to go out of your way to encourage your trainers and onboarding team to use interactive training sessions. That’s because these kinds of sessions help to bring dry subjects to life and to showcase your processes in real-world situations. It’s also easier for people to learn and remember things if they train in an interactive way.
To make these training sessions come to life, your trainers should go out of their way to simulate real-world scenarios to help seasonal workers to gain practical experience based upon what they’re likely to deal with in their day-to-day role.
The good news is that how.fm can help with that. The platform offers functionality like quizzes and the ability to add pictures/videos so that you can showcase the specific warehouse that workers will be working in. As well as making their real-world environments come alive, this will boost interactivity and help your onboarding team to create something that’s as realistic and relevant to the real world as possible.
3. Clear Communication and Support
Of course clear communication and ongoing support are essential for workers who are going through your onboarding process. Clear communication will ensure that you get your message across without any misunderstanding. While ongoing support will ensure that if any issues do come up, you can tackle them straight away instead of waiting for them to become a bigger problem.
Bear in mind that your seasonal workers are likely to have questions or concerns, and so it falls to you to make sure that they get answers to their questions and solutions for their concerns. You’ll also need to ensure that your seasonal workers know exactly where to direct their questions.
Your onboarding solution should provide a quick solution for troubleshooting that does not always involve other colleagues. By providing a self-service solution how.fm allows workers to find answers to their questions without having to find a supervisor. You can help them to develop a sense of self-control and self-sufficiency. That way, they’ll take ownership of their role and feel proud of the job they’re doing.
Conclusion
As we’ve seen throughout this article, managing the onboarding process for seasonal workers in logistics can be a huge challenge. The good news is that by adopting a worker-centered approach and deploying how.fm, you can create a more positive and effective onboarding experience for your seasonal workers.
It begins by understanding the perspective of seasonal workers and getting to know the unique challenges that they face. That will make it easier for you to create and implement strategies that prioritize their needs.
This works across all industries, but it’s particularly effective for logistics companies. It allows them to foster a sense of belonging amongst seasonal workers. When done well, it can enhance job performance and maximize the value of seasonal workers during the peak season. What’s not to like?