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Going part-time. The small print.

What’s holding your business back from recruiting? If it’s a matter of investment, keep reading. Businesses can save on recruitment and salary fees when they recruit part-time or flexibly. The truth is, they stand to gain hugely from bolstering their current team with another member of staff. 

When you recruit a part-time worker, you can often get way more skills for fewer hours at a lower price tag than if you recruited a full-time permanent member of staff. That’s because, part-time workers are usually very good at what they do. They just need greater flexibility in their lives to do it.

So, what’s holding your business back? Here’s the small print:

  1. Play it fair

    The law states that part-time employees cannot be treated less favourably than full-time workers. Whether it’s holding an all-company meeting or hosting an away-day on their day off, you need to consider how you can include everyone for company-wide events and meetings. Same goes for promotions. Don’t leave your part-timers out, it’s just not fair and it certainly isn’t legal.

  2. The question of the pro-rata salary

    This can be tricky to work out a pro-rata salary, but it doesn’t have to be as complicated as people think. It affects salary, holidays and benefits and incentives. Get it right and your staff will be motivated, loyal and productive – like all good part-time professionals. Get it wrong and you could be seen to be unfavourable to part-time employees. As a flexible and part-time recruiter, this is an area we are often asked to provide extra support with as part of the hiring process.

  1. Pro-rata and the working hours per week

    If your staff are contracted to work 35 hours per week, that’s fine. But if it’s 42 hours, it’s best to ensure any pro-rata part-time salary takes this into account. Jobs are advertised at full-time salaries, so when you pro-rata them down, there could be a massive shortfall. The more hours there are in the working week, the less pro-rata salary the employee will get. You don’t want anyone to feel hard done by.

  2. Pro-rata bank holidays

    If staff are working part-time but not on Mondays, they should be compensated for bank holidays. If they did the same job full-time, they’d be paid for eight bank holidays a year. How you compensate can be a grey area and one that HR Managers need to look out for. Ten2Two have lots of experience about how other businesses manage this.

  3. Pro-rata annual leave

    If an employee works reduced hours over five days, they would still really be entitled to get the same number of days off as a full-time worker. So, the best thing to do is to translate holiday allowance into hours for anyone not working full days. See more here. 

  4. Staff benefits and incentives

    Employee engagement and wellbeing is crucial in retaining good staff so it’s worth considering how well your company goes about managing staff benefits and incentives generally. If there’s a car allowance, your part-time worker should get this on a pro-rata basis also.

  5. Pay reviews and bonuses

    Whatever performance appraisal situation is in place, part-time staff should be included just the same as full-time members of staff. There should never be an attitude that part-time is less. If anything, the businesses we work with tell us that part-time and flexible workers have more to offer. That can be because their other commitments mean they have no choice but to work as effectively as possible to get everything done to a high standard within the hours allocated to them.

If you’d like to learn more about the high calibre flexible and part-time professionals on our books now, please get in touch.

We’d be happy to talk through any of this with you in more detail. Resourcing with Part-time and flexible workers is actually quite simple and definitely worth it – big benefits, big boosts to productivity and big rewards for businesses.

4 min read

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