Me and my co-author, Stephen Hundley opened up the Indiana State Human Resource Conference yesterday morning, our topic was “Employee Engagement In a Global Context“.  I am proud to say that the annual conference is a top five conference nationally in terms of attendees and exhibitors.  Not bad for us Hoosiers!

Stephen and I spoke in front of about 400 human resource professionals, adding content from our upcoming book into the presentation for the first time.  Interestingly, one of the added sections created a little bit of controversy, much more than we expected.  The topic?  Temporary/Contract workers.   As part of the presentation, we provided some information and strategies that could be used to engage this group of workers:

• Daily Satisfaction is the key driver of engagement for this group
• Ensuring a good fit between their skills and abilities and the job is as important to this group as it is to the full time “permanent” employees
• Providing tools and technology that are straight forward and easy to use is critical to the success of these workers

During the speech, I commented that in most cases, contract/temporary workers aren’t given the same development opportunities, work-life balance, flexibility in scheduling, and aren’t particularly affected by the reputation management of the organization.  Why?  They don’t work for temporary company, they work for the staffing company. 

However I did encourage the attendees to include these employees to participate in “company sponsored social events”.  Why?  These temp workers are expected to perform the same tasks as permanent workers.  They interact with other employees, supervisors, and managers.  More importantly, they interact with customers.  That fact alone is enough to make them important to the success of any organization. 

And the last national benchmark study my company conducted indicated employees who participate in those company events are significantly more engaged with their organization than employees who do not.  Those evening baseball games, pizza lunches, even participation in holiday events affect how employees feel about their organization, co-workers and boss.  Why purposefully exclude a group of people from these activities?

There I go again, being a researcher, making sweeping generalizations that get me in trouble…  and this one did.  I recognize the legal implications of treating “non-employees” as “employees”.  Really, I get it.  I understand the “Microsoft” ruling and the implications it has on how disparate groups of a company’s overall workforce are treated.  Really, I get it.

Do you manage these groups as regular employees or are they an “outsourced variable cost”?