How You Can Boost Manufacturing Productivity with Temporary Staffing

Temporary staffing is a great way to keep your business adaptable. It lets you handle seasonal demands and short-term requests without bringing in more permanent workers than you need at other times.

For many manufacturing businesses, the best approach to staffing is to supplement permanent employees with a staffing agency you can call on for temporary needs. In some cases, it also makes sense to hire long-term employees through a temp-to-hire arrangement.

When Temporary Staffing Makes Sense In Manufacturing

There are many times when temporary staffing is more efficient than permanent staffing. It’s usually the best option for short-term needs in the manufacturing space. Businesses often use temps for seasonal spikes around holidays and large one-time requests.

In some cases, working with a staffing agency also makes sense as a part of your long-term hiring strategy. Many employers benefit from temp-to-hire staffing. This arrangement lets you try out an employee as a temp before taking on the administrative costs to hire them long-term.

A temporary staffing agency can also help you speed up your long-term hiring processes. Some agencies do direct hiring as well as temp staffing for clients. They can take on the work of finding qualified applicants, checking their skills, doing background checks, and even training the employees in some cases.

How Temp Staffing Can Boost Your Business’s Productivity

1. Fill Immediate Staffing Needs With Less Risk

If you need more hands on deck quickly, temporary staffing is a great way to go. A well-established temp agency can source workers faster than anyone else and bring them on board quickly. The agency will often have a pool of pre-screened talent it can draw from for your staffing needs.

Since they’re the primary employer of the temps, the temp agency takes on many of the legal risks associated with being an employer. However, you will still share some responsibility for things like meeting OSHA requirements and staying in compliance with the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA).

2. Try Out Workers Before Making a Long-Term Commitment

Your business wants to hire the most productive workers possible, especially for longer-term manufacturing roles. Unfortunately, you can’t know for sure how productive a worker will be until you’ve seen how they work.

Temp-to-hire staffing is sometimes a good way to reduce the risk of making a bad hire. You can hire someone as a temp with the understanding that there may be an opportunity for long-term employment if they do well. It’s often an especially good way to hire early-career workers who are still proving their skills.

3. Keep Your Business Flexible and Scalable

Having an ongoing relationship with a temp staffing agency helps your business stay prepared for changing demands. You know you can trust the agency to find the right people quickly whenever you have temporary increases in demand, both now and in the future.

Temp staffing makes your business scalable. It allows your business to scale up when more workers are needed and scale back down when they’re not.

4. Bring in Specialized Manufacturing Skills

You may occasionally need workers with different skillsets from your primary workforce. A staffing agency can help with these situations.

The right agency will know what to look for in a machinist, tool and die maker, quality control specialist, or any other manufacturing role. They can bring in the right people in time for a new product launch or other need.

5. Take the Load Off of Regular Employees

If your current employees are overwhelmed, you need to address it quickly. Waiting to bring in more hands often means letting quality suffer, damaging your relationship with your existing client. It’s also a recipe for employee burnout and turnover.

Bringing in temps can help you fix the problem as quickly as possible. You can take tasks off your regular employees’ hands and create a more sustainable workflow.

6. Keep Administrative and Payroll Costs Down

Hiring a long-term employee means you are responsible for payroll, paying into unemployment, workers’ compensation insurance, and all the associated documentation. It also typically brings expenses like health insurance, PTO, and other benefits.

If you hire a temp through a staffing agency, the agency is typically the employer-of-record. That means you don’t have to worry about those expenses and paperwork unless you later decide to bring in the worker as your own long-term employee.

Tips For Temp Staffing Success

• Make sure your temps get good training. Training pays for itself by ensuring your temps do quality work based on your business’s established processes. Keep the company overview brief and make sure temps know where to find things like equipment cheat sheets and policy documents. In some cases, the temp agency may be able to do the training for you.
• Maintain your quality control standards. Keep your quality standards high so your existing customers stay happy with your work.
• Put thought into the job description. A temp agency won’t know exactly what you’re looking for unless you tell them, so take the time to check over the job description before you send it to them. Ask a production or floor manager to review it before you send it out.
• Work with an established staffing agency. An agency that’s been around for a while will likely have a history of successful placements with clients like you. They will have honed their processes and built up their talent pool so they can quickly find you the right person for the job.

Looking For a Manufacturing Staffing Agency in Utah?

LG Resources has over a decade of experience with manufacturing staffing. We use thorough screenings and solid training processes to bring you the right employee for every role. Our company has helped place over 20,000 employees in a wide variety of roles at over 2,000 local businesses.

Request an employee from LG Resources today to help boost your manufacturing productivity.