How to Keep Things Running When You Are Short Staffed and Looking for Applicants
You’ve just lost an employee – whether through retirement, involuntary termination or resignation —and the timing couldn’t be worse. You’re gearing up for a busy season and need to have all hands on deck – which means that you just need to get bodies in the door, right?
This type of thinking can be dangerous, since it can lead you to hire less-than-ideal ideal candidates. Increased workloads put additional pressure on hiring managers and can prompt them to overlook red flags that come up when interviewing. This leads to bad hires which end up creating more work later down the line. By taking some of this pressure off, it gives hiring managers more opportunity to properly search for new staff.
Tips to Cope With a Staffing Shortage
- Delegate the extra responsibility. Spreading the extra work to multiple employees ensures that no one individual has the burden of doing two jobs in the same amount of time.
- Cross-train current employees. When employees know how to do each other’s jobs, it helps to create flexibility and allows you to move employees into different positions or assign tasks based on the exact jobs you need filled, without rushing to hire someone.
- Set priorities. When you’re short-staffed, there’s more pressure and more to get done in a day. This is where it becomes important to manage stress levels, and one way to do that is to prioritize the tasks that must get done in a single day and scheduling non-essential tasks for another day.
- Stay focused. In a high-pressure situation, it’s easy to try and multitask, or jump around from task to task when something pops into your head. Unfortunately, that does not bode well for efficiency and completing important tasks.
- Consider hiring a temp. You may want to consider hiring a temporary employee to do some of the essential, but less technical jobs that you don’t want to assign to your more experienced employees.
If you’re looking for ways to cope with an employee shortage and still get the same amount of work done, or you’re interested in hiring a temporary employee, the professionals at ADAM Personnel can help. Contact us today to learn more.
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