8 Communicative Ways to Offer Training to Your Seasonal Employees

Most businesses face the need for more employees during the holiday season. Some companies also experience a hike in demand for their goods seasonally.

In such times, a business must bring in extra manpower. This seasonal workforce needs to be trained quickly and functionally to meet the acutely increasing demand. This is especially true for the retail and entertainment industries – they see the highest demand curve and often need to hire seasonal workers for the festive season.

This becomes a complicated process since these workers are temporary, and investing heavily in their training will not yield long-term results. Yet, they can’t function accurately and make sales without undergoing training.

So, it becomes imperative for businesses to train their seasonal employees. Let’s dive into everything you need to know about guiding your seasonal workforce.

The Need for Training Seasonal Employees

Except for the obvious need to meet the increasing demand during the festive or holiday season, there are certainly other reasons why the need to train your seasonal employees arises:

Providing Good Customer Experience

For new-age businesses, it is not just enough to make a sale. They need to leave a lasting effect, and this can be achieved through the best customer service. Hence, it is necessary to train your workforce, seasonal or otherwise.

Help With Products

If customers need some help with the usage of products, then having a product demonstrator answering questions and assisting them will boost the store’s overall image. This makes for another reason to hire temporary staff.

Real-Time Help With Returns or Exchanges

If customers come back with products for some reason, then you must have staff available to respond to their issue quickly and efficiently – more the reason for extra manpower.

8 Tips on Training Your Seasonal Workforce

By now, the importance of an additional workforce for businesses with seasonal demand is pretty obvious. Now, let us check out some tips on how to train them.

1. Define Your Expectations

The seasonal workforce is to be treated like your new employees. So, you need to brief them in detail about the workings of the company and what you expect out of them. Their roles should be precisely defined, and their training should run them through the logistics of everything they will be doing on the job.

2. Issue Hands-on Product Education

If you are selling a product, make sure that you give the new employees all the information they need and that they see the product’s functionality in practice. Demonstrate your product to them as you would for your customer.

If you are selling a service, ensure they have a thorough understanding of the USP and service overall. At the end of the day, they should have answers to all the questions customers might have.

3. Create Engaging Training Tools

The main shortcoming of a temporary employee is that they are aware that this opportunity is not long-term. Therefore, chances are that they can feel less interested in the job.

You can try to overcome this by making the environment more exciting. Create interesting videos that grip their attention. Use a video editor to create compelling training videos setting the tone that the work opportunity and responsibilities are equal for long-term and seasonal employees.

4. Give Access to Mobile-Friendly Training

Make sure that the training you provide this workforce is not rigid to the environment – it should be a matter of convenience. If you provide mobile-friendly training, they can access it in their own time.

Invest in producing image to video content that is cost-effective to create and easier to digest and understand. They can go through it as and when they like. This makes the end goal static but the process flexible and, in turn, will boost the efficiency of your new staff.

5. Train in Real-Time as a Continuous Process

Take on the training of these employees as if it is a continuous process. Instead of going heavy on the training and making it accumulated knowledge, try making it a continuous process. This will provide new employees the space to apply what they have learned. 

The more they consume, the less they retain. So, schedule regular training and testing sessions instead of bombarding them with everything at once. This will also keep them successful in retaining information in real time.

6. Create Bite-Sized Lessons

Keep the lessons short, important, and relevant. Don’t try to feed your employees as much data as you can. Instead, try making micro lessons out of a heavy bulk of information.

The engagement you will receive with this process will be higher. This will not hinder their important work or look like a hefty, time-consuming task. The micro lessons will essentially help keep them retain the focus on the information.

7. Boost Peer-To-Peer Learning

Learning something is generally a monotonous task. Your employees may not take information as it is supposed to. But if you introduce it as peer activity, it will help them build connections with their peers.

It will also get them more experience quickly if they are paired with someone who has experience in the field. They can observe the experienced employees, learn from them, and gain feedback for their work while building lasting connections.

8. Provide Incentives

Finally, it is imperative to motivate even your seasonal workforce with incentives such as certificates, free coupons, or vouchers. After all, they too, needed to go through effective and real-time, dynamic training to reach their learning milestones successfully.

Conclusion

To sum up, if you are looking to leverage seasonal staff hiring, make sure that their training is not overlooked. Over and above this, provide them with modern-day training that motivates their growth and takes their learning curve to a new high. Create a training model so your employees can be ready before they begin their first day. The only way to do this is by planning. Consider this an investment that will come with utility each time you hire seasonal staff.