Learning to thrive in a tight labor market

While CEOs and senior executives are entering a period of high turnover and job insecurity, the general labor market remains tight, with many employers complaining that it is so hard to find the right people that they are frequently settling for second best. When management is prepared to consider using part-time workers - not just as a stop-gap, but as a regular employment method - they can open up to both themselves and their new employees a flexible, powerful answer to their human resource needs.

There is really no fundamental reason why part-time staff should be more difficult to manage, conceptually, than traditional full-time employees. If managers learn to think more flexibly about shifts, hours, staffing, and even techniques such as flexi-time or telecommuting, they will find that developing or adapting tracking and supervisory tools to control production and manage workers is pretty straightforward.

Moreover, they will open to themselves access to skilled, experienced, and reliable workers that are presently under-employed or unhappily not even seeking jobs, such as moms who have left the labor market due to the demands of raising young children (this is an especially valuable and under-used segment of the potential labor pool), other adults looking after aging or disabled family members, or retirees.

Many firms have done quite well using, even specializing in, hiring from these groups on a part-time basis. A mutual company concentrating on insuring military service men and women and their families, USAA, has done this and is highly regarded both by customers for its efficiency and service, and by employees as a great place to work.

What employers do want to consider with part-time work forces is the need to maintain levels of training, advancement, and inter-connectivity among these employees and the rest of the staff. As the numbers of shifts and workers both increase, so will managerial attention and time to training. When part-timers are used alongside full-timers, they cannot be allowed to occupy - or perceive that they are occupying - a secondary place in the organization. They must be afforded individual training opportunities on a par with their full-time counterparts, and they should have the same standardized all-staff training requirements and opportunities as all employees. In such an environment, all should be promoted based on contribution, and not seniority as determined by hours (although the military reserve promotion system, employed in an integrated fashion with the active-duty system, is also a decent model, here). And, they should be made a full part of organizational social and community activities; managers should be careful to make them feel a continuously vital part of the overall workforce.

Paying this additional attention to the part-time workforce is much like paying attention to current customers: it is much less burdensome than finding new ones (or full-time employees in a saturated market), and pays handsome dividends for all concerned.