Work and working are part of natural life. Quite a few people ask when meeting someone new: what do you do for a living? The object of interest is the person, the content, the motivation and the feeling of the job. Fewer people are interested in what kind of pay relationship the person has with the company.
This same interpersonal attitude is reflected in the conversation between successful companies. People are employed in a company on a permanent, part-time, temporary, monthly, hourly or rental basis. There are your own people and there are partners' people in the same premises, in the same jobs. All part of the same team, however. Temporary work has been done in Finland for at least 60 years, the first jobs were in the shipbuilding industry. The reasons for the use of temporary agency work included increasing competition and the need for seasonal industries to quickly obtain a large number of additional workers.
The needs for temporary agency work, or rather the hiring out of skills, are still very similar today. There is also often a desire to find a solution to convert fixed costs into variable costs.
"Temporary agency work should therefore be seen as an equal part of a functioning working life and as equal to other forms of employment. While people want more freedom and autonomy in their working lives in terms of when they work, companies want scalability. Work and work tasks are becoming more fragmented and diversified. When fragmented work becomes more socially valued, it is not negatively referred to as 'shredding'."
For companies, the use of agency work allows scalability of operations and skills in high and low cycles and balances the workload of their own staff in everyday life. Temporary agency work increases job diversity and flexibility. This raises the question of how we can further encourage companies to see temporary agency work as a resource for success and an enabler of growth and quality.
Hiring out skills is where needs meet
We warmly recommend at least trying out whether skills hiring could fit your business needs. Where appropriate, for example to meet a volume peak, you could take on two or three pre-trained experts to ease the workload of your own staff. Hiring skills is a risk-free and quick way to adjust staffing levels as labour needs change. It can also be a suitable experiment before the possible outsourcing of activities to a partner company. Skills can be hired out at flexible rates for a fixed term, indefinitely, for a job or two, or on a long-term basis.
The cost-effectiveness of hiring out skills compared to using in-house staff lies in the overall costs: the recruitment process does not use up the company's own resources, the risk of hiring an incompetent employee is reduced, the administrative workload is reduced, there are always holidaymakers and the fixed costs of staff are turned into variable costs. The HR service partner should therefore have a team of pre-trained people who always have the right skills. We talk fluently about continuous improvement of processes and procedures, but equally, skills need to be developed continuously.
"For example, logistics professionals do not grow on every branch. It is therefore natural to hire expertise from a company that specializes in this field. At the same time, it is worth paying attention to the vision and expertise of the company providing personnel services in terms of safety at work, increasing work motivation and the attitude of staff towards work and working. Once employees have been familiarised and trained in advance, they will start working as soon as the need arises. For example, we have a dedicated unit, which is responsible for training and familiarising Transval employees."
People-centerdness and needs as a source of motivation
Temporary work also gives the employee, the skilled worker, flexibility and freedom of choice. Students, for example, can easily combine studying and working. For some, temporary work provides the necessary additional income: students, professional athletes, parents of young children, pensioners. For many, temporary work offers the possibility of finding employment, acting as a stepping stone to the world of work.
The variety of work is a major motivator: some of our employees want to see different jobs, gain work experience and skills in a variety of ways, get to know many different work communities and cultures. They want to learn new things. The better and more diverse our skills are, the more of us will succeed in tomorrow's world. But temporary work is not for everyone. The solution lies in matching the needs, motivations and attitudes of the job and the talent.
