We ve just hired two new staffers to boost the digital and production side of the business. One of them is working 16 hours a week: Tuesday to Thursday between 10am and 2pm. It’s great for her as she can drop off and pick up her children from school while avoiding the significant expense of childcare.
The benefits for our business is that we can bring in a highly-skilled and experienced professional when we don’t need someone to cover full-time, have a fixed budget and want to keep costs down.
Importantly, it enables us to respond to the inevitable peaks and changes in demand. Recently, we have had a surge in business activity. We ve won some large accounts and we ve also expanded the scope of what we do.
We have always focused on building targeted custom audiences” for B2B marketing, corporate and Investor Relations (IR). Earlier this year, we launched our first product ?Stakeholder” an IR marketing product to help companies build their investor base.
Moreover, we have also set up a new company dedicated to focusing on opportunities in the legal sector. This has put pressure on our team. To help reduce the workloads, stress and fatigue and the overtime we were paying, we have had to recruit more talent.
It is still early days but introducing part-time staff into our employment equation has already paid dividends. The downsides are that the recruitment and administration costs can be slightly higher than taking on a single full-time employee.
There are also extra costs you need to factor in,?regarding pension provision and company benefits. Another potential drawback is that you may need to spend extra time supervising two job-sharers than just one full-time member of staff.
Don?t forget the legal requirements. Part-timers have the same rights as full-timers and therefore must be provided with the same pro-rata terms and conditions including pay, holidays, sick pay, maternity/paternity leave, entitlement to company pension schemes as well as equal access to promotion or redundancy.
It has been a strategic decision to combine both full and part-time staff. It allows us to expand the pool of potential recruits. There’s an army of well-qualified people in London who would be prepared to work and to work hard, if they could only get the chance to work on a part-time, flexible basis.
So, we are now actively looking for other talented candidates, who cannot or may not want to work full-time, such as parents with young families. Whatever the pros and cons of recruiting part-time work colleagues, it’s ultimately about the right person in the right position.
