SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA CAREERS / PART-TIME CAREERS : Managers Find Added Challenges

Sure, hiring contingent workers--part-timers, contractors and temporary employees--gives a business flexibility, opportunity to fit the person to the job and a way to ease into growth. But there’s also a downside. Turnover is greater among such employees; recruiting and training costs likely will go up, and supervisors may find more chores dumped on them.

That’s why managers caught up in today’s trend of trying to do more with less need to have a balanced view of the impact of part-timers and other contingent workers on their departments and the overall business, say management experts.

Using contingent workers may not reduce costs as much as employers hope--maybe not at all.

Contingents often work for lower wages than permanent employees and for few or no benefits. But that’s only part of the picture, cautions Stanley Nollen, a professor in the business school at Georgetown University in Washington. Nollen was co-author of “Permanent Part-Time Employment: The Manager’s Perspective” and is writing another on contingent workers.

“What you care about is not compensation,” Nollen said, “but unit labor costs. And that’s a matter of compensation and how much you get from them: the quantity and quality of worker output.”

Contingent workers tend to be somewhat less productive than full-time, permanent employees, Nollen said. “And if their productivity is less, you may not have lesser costs.”

In fact, said Alison Davis-Blake, a professor of management at the University of Texas at Austin, the first question managers must answer regarding contingent workers is “why are we using these employees? If it is just to cut costs, it had better be clear that costs actually will be cut. And if you’re just trying to cut costs, there are better ways to do it,” she said.

One cost managers often fail to consider is training. Most jobs require at least initial training and orientation. The cost of that training, multiplied by higher rates of turnover for contingent workers, can be the key factor in determining whether a company saves money by hiring part-timers.

Companies that are growing often use part-time positions to bolster the work force gradually. Other firms find that creating part-time or free-lance slots is a good way to retain employees who no longer want to work full time or cannot do so.

Those are the best reasons to use part-timers, say management experts. Another is that some jobs may require only part-time attention. Then, managers find they can “get four full hours of work in a half-day, that it’s easier to modulate the work with the demand,” said Scott Setrakian, vice president of Mercer Management Consulting in San Francisco. Filling the same job with a full-time employee builds in inefficiencies, he added. When companies begin replacing full-time workers with part-time, temporary or contract employees, problems can develop that lead to unforeseen costs.

The remaining permanent employees may in fact feel less secure and less satisfied with their jobs.

Front-line supervisors find they have to do more detailed and closer supervision, says Davis-Blake. There are scheduling hassles and new budgeting nuances.

The supervisor’s job “naturally picks up things falling between cracks, and there are more things falling between cracks if there are part-timers or contractors,” said Jone Pearce, a professor at UC Irvine who has studied contingent labor in the aerospace industry.

The core permanent employees are saddled with training the part-timers. And they often find their workload has been redistributed, so that they get more of the difficult jobs while the part-timers do tasks that require less experience and less familiarity with policies and procedures.

“If you just have the core workers working harder and not necessarily on better work, they become more dissatisfied,” said Davis-Blake. That can lead to poor morale, greater turnover and, again, higher training costs.

There’s a final factor managers need to consider when assessing the long-range effects of restructuring their work force, consultant Setrakian said.

“There is a spiritual dimension to working in a team structure that is facilitated by longevity, familiarity, fighting from the same foxhole and evolving and maturing together,” he said. “While this is not solely the province of full-time employment, it’s my observation that it is primarily in that province, and that a wholesale replacement of 10 full-time employees by 20 half-time employees would . . . result in material long-term dislocation of a company’s culture, spirit and momentum.”