For companies with seasonal spikes, like accounting firms at tax time or retail stores during Christmas, hiring a part-time, temporary workforce is a natural part of annual operations. While this works well for handling labor costs, it can pose some real challenges for IT and for the company’s cybersecurity. It’s critical for management to keep these considerations in mind when hiring even one or two seasonal workers.

SEASONAL STAFF CONSIDERATIONS TO KEEP BOTH SECURITY AND PRODUCTIVITY HIGH

Security

Anytime you hire someone part-time, overall security—not just cybersecurity—should be a concern. The background check may have passed with flying colors, but their risk score nevertheless remains much higher than permanent employees who are on your payroll. This is because seasonal workers are transient by nature. Trusting a temp with customer and business data is a risky choice, so defining strict access permissions for temporary workers is critical to making sure that managers aren’t stretched thin micromanaging their work.

Infrastructure

Even for companies whose seasonal workforce isn’t using computers, they still need access to technical resources like internet and phone or time entry. Managing the equipment, licenses, access, and permissions should be standardized where possible to not only help streamline the onboarding and offboarding processes, but also to ensure that these workers have the resources they need before being flooded by last-minute requests.

Lack of Training

It’s a bit simpler to add cybersecurity best practice training into your full-time employee onboarding, but what about your temps? Usually, these employees are hired and put to work in short order since the peak season is either starting shortly or has already begun. When hiring short-term staff, small businesses and even bigger organizations rarely invest any time or resources in general training and induction, let alone training around security. Make sure that your temp onboarding plan includes basic cybersecurity and critical technology training at a minimum, even if it means they need an extra day before hitting the ground running.

Collaboration Needs

For companies that can support remote work, it’s becoming more common to hire employees from across the country or even the globe because there may be cost savings. To make sure they’re getting every drop of productivity out of these workers, it’s important to ensure that their access to staff and assets is seamless. High-quality collaboration tools for file sharing and communication need to be in place, and an overview training plan needs to be added to any onboarding processes.

CREATE A REPEATABLE, COMPREHENSIVE SEASONAL STAFF IT PLAN

Having part-time or seasonal staff is an excellent solution to time-specific resource needs. But a reliable onboarding, monitoring, and offboarding plan is critical to ensuring that companies not only get the most for their labor money, but also so they maintain the tightest security possible. We help companies develop and document these processes all the time. If you need help with yours, don’t hesitate to reach out.