By Rob Seay July 21, 2017TLNT
It’s time to stop taking the hourly employee for granted.
Despite the fact that hourly employees are nearly 60% of the US workforce, leaders have a tendency to discount them when formulating their employee engagement strategies. The high turnover in hourly positions (49% on average according to one study), mixed with the idea hourly workers are a renewable resource that can always be replaced, leads to management styles that outright ignore the needs of this group. Leaders instead focus their efforts on engaging salaried employees, who they may perceive as more “valuable” because of the greater time, effort, and costs associated with finding talent for these professions.
Hourly workers deserve to be on the receiving end of employee engagement strategies, too. They are the executors of the modern organization. In industrial work, they’re the ones handling the product, keeping everything up to standards. In administrative settings, they’re making sure the organization is running smoothly on a day-to-day basis. In customer-facing positions they’re the face of the business.
For any business they are a part of, hourly employees are the seldom-acknowledged backbone that keeps the organization operational. Here are three strategies leaders can leverage to engage hourly employees:
About the Author Rob Seay is the HR director for employee engagement and workplace culture platform Bonfyre. He is an accomplished Human Resources professional with proven leadership and management experience who has worked with leading businesses in various healthcare, enterprise tech and consumer goods industries such as Energizer Holdings, Covidien, bioMerieux and Anheuser-Busch Companies. Rob thrives when building talented teams and maintains positive employee relations during times of tremendous organizational change.
- Make work meaningful
- Build relationships
- Give them a seat at the table
About the Author Rob Seay is the HR director for employee engagement and workplace culture platform Bonfyre. He is an accomplished Human Resources professional with proven leadership and management experience who has worked with leading businesses in various healthcare, enterprise tech and consumer goods industries such as Energizer Holdings, Covidien, bioMerieux and Anheuser-Busch Companies. Rob thrives when building talented teams and maintains positive employee relations during times of tremendous organizational change.