Human Resources Outsourcing: Help Your Business and Employees Weather the Economy

Your efforts to help your employees will help your business

downturnJust about anything you can do to help your employees come to work and stay there helps your business and your human resources efforts.  The single biggest threat to keeping the best employees is their cost of getting to and from work.  Remember, your best employees are the ones at greatest risk for moving on, as they are the most marketable and the ones who will have the easiest time winning a comparable job closer to home.  Experienced human resources professionals and human resources outsourcing firms can attest to that fact but they are able to help provide business with creative and powerful alternatives to losing employees.  During the economic downturn, and in the face of increasing commuting costs, lend a helping hand to valuable employees and help out the company at the same time.

Three easy ways to increase productivity and reduce commuting

According to recent surveys, the three most effective ways to add benefit to your employees without necessarily increasing any costs to the company is through:

  • A compressed workweek—working 10 hours for four days instead of eight hours for five days, for example
  • Facilitation of car pools –helping employees get to work at less cost to them
  • Allow/encourage telecommuting—working from home by using the telephone and internet/network connections

A recent survey conducted by Challenger, Gray & Christmas, a recruiter and outplacement firm located in Chicago, indicates: “More than half (57 percent) of human resources professionals  in a survey . . . say their companies offer some type of program designed to alleviate increased commuting costs . . . .”  Additionally, the survey reports that about one in five actively participate in organizing and overseeing employee carpools and just under one in five subsidize the cost of public transportation.  One in six let people telecommute from home one day out of the week or more.  Industry expert and chairman of the board, John Challenger states, “many employers still count the recruitment and retention of talent among their top priorities.  So they offer these gas-saving perks partly to keep their best and brightest workers from looking for jobs closer to home (Inspiring Thoughts, www.officepolitics.com, May 30, 2008).”

Except for runaway inflation overall, nothing has taken a bigger bite out of a salary

Currently, at today’s cost of fuel, it is estimated that it will cost a person driving a car roughly 15,000 miles a year (probably about average for most who have light-to-moderate work commutes) about $14,100 (www.commutesolutions.org/calc.htm).  That is a staggering amount for almost anyone to have removed from his or her net income.  If that huge expense could be shared, and divided by six (in a full-size car) or by nine (in a 9-passenger van), it is as good as thousands of dollars in raises.  Moreover, just allowing each person the opportunity to telecommute (work from home using networking via internet connection and the telephone) provides an increase of 20% to the person’s commute savings.  This is a situation/challenge tailor-made for a human resources professional in any company to take on.

Big differences can be accomplished through small changes

There are only a few rules that need to be enacted to make it simple to compress a workweek.  For example, designate Mondays and Fridays as telecommute days and help employees balance the schedule to reduce the impact toward on-site activities.  Schedule in-person meetings only on Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays.  Adjust the daytime hours so all employees must be at work between, say, 10 and 3.  That way rush hour traffic (also expensive) can be avoided and people can schedule work days from 6 to 3, 7 to 4, or 8 to 5, for example, but all employees would be predictably on-site during those specified hours.

Human resources outsourcing experience, along with your own, can make it happen

Human resources professionals and human resources outsourcing firms can help develop other ideas through experience and provide a view to what other companies have created along those lines.  Using some creativity, helping employees organize carpooling can be of great benefit to both the company and the employee.  The answer lies in cooperation and creativity.

Some concepts can be generous and self-serving at the same time

These concepts are not altogether generous offers; they are self-serving to the company, as well as a great human resources opportunity for your staff.  Over one third of the companies mentioned in the survey have said they have had candidates they badly wanted to hire turn down lucrative job offers because of the expense involved in long commutes.  Such long commutes are not just part of life in Chicago, New York, or Los Angeles; they are a fact of life in Phoenix, Tucson and almost any major cities in the United States.  The housing market of previous years caused people to seek more desirable places to live in the outskirts while making the most of the larger, city-based salaries by locating their families farther and farther outside the city.  Now, we are paying the price for trying to make the dollar go further in years passed by driving into rapidly escalating commutes.  By adjusting the way we do business on a daily basis, perhaps we can all find ourselves on the road back to a happier compromise.

For more information about how we can help you with your Human Resources, call us at 888-700-8512, request a proposal or contact us.