When Coverguard Security was being assessed for SIA ACS Certification one of the questions I was asked by our assessor was “why do you treat your self-employed contractors in the same way as you treat your staff? You don’t need to.” That comment has stuck with me for a good while now, and still irritates me a year after it was made.
Self-employed contractors are a God-send to us. When something happens – for example the Manchester concert bombing – our workload can triple over night. We get no warning and all of a sudden our clients need three or four officers instead of one each shift. One of our clients went from requesting 100 hours a month from us to 450 each month; and that was just one of our clients. Every client had similar increased needs. We had to call our self-employed guys to help out because we couldn’t just recruit a whole entire workforce over night. Chopping and changing their personal lives, they pulled out all of the stops to help us cover the shifts, and we are eternally grateful to them for the loyalty they showed to us – even though they didn’t need to.
I believe loyalty and respect goes both ways. The better you treat your staff and self-employed contractors, the more they will want to work for you. To read more, click here.
