Job Shadowing for Seasonal Hires

When you’re hiring seasonal workers, onboarding still matters—even if their tenure comes with an understood end-date. However, providing a full-on, integrated onboarding experience might not be in the cards for these workers.

Invest in your seasonal hires

The employee experience can be a reflection of your culture. It can also influence the culture, and the way your company performs in the eyes of customers. But how can you make culture part of the way you train seasonal hires?

It should come as no surprise if seasonal hires are less committed to your company and your culture than  your other employees. However, you still want to do things that help to set them up for success, help speed up the learning curve, and leave a positive brand impression on them. After all, you never know when a seasonal hire might transition into a longer term contributor.

That’s where job shadowing can be a big help.

Below we’ll look at three key points related to how job shadowing can help seasonal and all new workers get comfortable with the workplace, jump into work, and gain a positive impression of your company and your people.

Support your seasonal employees

What happens during a new hire’s first days can be vital, especially when they’ll only be around during busy season. And just as a successful onboarding experience can be the different between turning an employee into a key contributor, or a passive job seeker, the same is true for seasonal hires.

Seasonal workers want to feel like they made the right decision. After all, there are other options out there.

Perhaps you generally put new employees through a mentoring program that gives them a chance to meet with trusted team members while they to learn the ropes. This might be how they sort out confusions, gain confidence, and even begin to build their career maps. But typically, this type of mentoring takes place over the course of weeks, months, or even years, depending on the track an employee is following.

Job shadowing can help seasonal hires come up to speed, and find the support they need.

When you need seasonal hires to be able to jump right in, a job shadowing program can help fast track them through their work functions. Here are three key points of job shadowing to keep in mind:

1. Job shadowing is like speed mentoring.

Job shadowing typically involves pairing new hires with a seasoned employee during the workday. You’ll want to assign a specific employee, or a group of employees, to help seasonal hires come up to speed on basic processes that relate to their core responsibilities.

• At the start, job shadowing can help ease new hires into the tasks and duties of the job, meet coworkers, and build confidence.
• Some organizations include job shadowing as part of a formal group orientation, and might break a larger group of new hires into smaller groups of three or four that shadow the same employee.
• As part of your shadowing team, employees can swap their groups at different times. This can be especially helpful when seasonal hires will be working across departments, or with a number of different employees.

2. Job shadowing can cover as many details as necessary.

Depending on your organization, as well as the volume of work, job shadowing might involve any or all of the following:

• Taking notes
• Listening as experienced employees explain steps and tasks
• Asking questions
• Completing hands-on tasks in a step-by-step fashion
• Attending meetings
• Discussing how workflow changes at different times of day and days of the week
• Touring the workplace
• Meeting with members of different departments
• Getting up to speed on various systems and tools

3. Job shadowing can help seasonal hires uncover your company culture.

For employees who have been with you for a while, company culture can be one of those things that’s easy to take for granted, or shrugged off as “the way we do things around here.”

• When your company is in growth mode, or if you’re adding groups of seasonal workers in quick succession, it’s easy for departments and workgroups to become isolated, or put their heads down through a particularly busy stretch. Job shadowing can actually help teams break out of their silos.
• The act of walking new employees around, introducing them to coworkers, and showing them the ropes is a chance for your people to take a step back, and refresh their own thinking around the culture of your workplace.

In the end, job shadowing can even make it easier for everyone to see the ways that different parts of the company work together to accomplish goals, satisfy customers, and create a more cohesive work environment.