WorkJam for seasonal workers helps retailers cut training and HR costs while improving the customer experience during critical peak seasons
Montreal, Canada—September 27, 2016 – WorkJam, the employee engagement platform for the hourly workforce, announced today new platform features aimed to boost engagement among seasonal workforces. The latest additions empower employers to optimize their relationships with past and present seasonal employees, which reduces future recruitment challenges, improves forecasting, lowers overall seasonal labor costs and builds a tailored on-demand labor force.
Every year, there is more and more competition among retailers to attract and hire the best possible talent for holidays and other peak periods. This increase in labor demand is caused by various factors, including the high growth of omni-channel retail, which has led to a spike of in-store pick-ups and returns directly impacting the limited bandwidth of store employees. Due to this heavy competition for labor, retailers are beginning to hire workers earlier and labor wages are increasing. With already low unemployment and regular wages on the rise, this is becoming an even more difficult feat.
Retailers that are looking for ways to keep costs in-line while avoiding being understaffed this holiday season now have a powerful new tool, WorkJam. The new features, released as an addition to the existing WorkJam cloud platform, provide retailers the ability to stay in contact with past seasonal workers throughout the year, easily bring back the best ones for peak seasons and offer scheduling flexibility.
WorkJam for seasonal workers allows employers to:
- Instantly onboard with a single click, inviting the best seasonal workers to reactivate their employee relationship and guide them through the reactivation process
- Keep seasonal employees up to date with company developments relevant to them through an interactive mobile/web experience
- Easily attract, retain and bring back online the best employees
- Maintain active communication with seasonal labor without incurring WFM licensing
- Enable profiling of inactive employees to recruit from a preferred labor pool
- Provide seasonal employees the ability to pick up open shifts that current labor cannot fill
- Conduct exit surveys for seasonal labor
- Provide mobile training with assessments for improved re-onboarding
With WorkJam, employers can build an experienced pool of on-demand labor by allowing seasonal workers to apply for open shifts when they cannot be filled by the current labor pool. With on-demand labor capabilities, employers can get the gig-economy to work for them using a trusted, trained and experienced bench of seasonal workers.
“The ability to stay in touch with seasonal workers who performed well last year is huge,” said Alex Daunter, Director of Operations for Sticky Fingers Ribhouse. “If we can easily stay in touch with our seasonal workers and know who we can count on, it reduces our risk of bad hires, cuts our training costs and improves the customer service experience during our critical peak season where just a few weeks of understaffing and poor quality staff can have a detrimental impact on our business.”
After peak periods, seasonal employees are often deactivated from companies’ workforce management systems, such as Kronos or JDA, to save money on licensing costs. With WorkJam, retailers can stay connected with seasonal workers without incurring extra costs from their WFM.
“To keep customers, employees and shareholders happy, you need to be able to better control your ability to plan for and respond to unpredictable labor demands. This is why WorkJam now enables companies to keep seasonal employees engaged throughout the year, helping to avoid last-minute hiring that typically leads to financial loss, overtime pay, understaffing, poor customer experience and damaged brand reputation,” said Steven Kramer, CEO of WorkJam. “With WorkJam, employers can now get personal with their seasonal employees and maintain an active relationship like never before.”
About WorkJam
WorkJam is an employee engagement platform that runs standalone or integrated with existing workforce management systems to empower companies with shift-based and hourly workers to manage and optimize the entire employee-employer relationship life cycle with dynamic mobile schedule management, on-demand training and assessments, streamlined communication and employee recognition and reviews.
WorkJam drives down labor costs, lowers attrition rates, improves compliance, optimizes labor in relation to demand and improves the customer experience and sales with a happier, more engaged staff. For employees, WorkJam enables more control over their schedule and work- life balance, as well as presents the opportunity to maximize their earnings, develop skills, and advance their economic well-being. Learn more about WorkJam at WorkJam.com
