YARMOUTH, Maine—Many retailers supplement their permanent staff with temporary employees during the holiday season, but are they paying enough attention to proper policies and procedures to account for such transitory employees?

“In order to process them in a timely manner and get them trained and out on the sales floor quickly, retailers don’t take the precautions they normally take with their own employees,” said David Levenberg, senior vice president for Andrews International.

Retailers need to make sure they conduct background checks or properly vet employees prior to hiring them. Neglecting such critical steps can have serious repercussions and liabilities for retailers. Granting temporary employees access to customer credit card information and privileges to restricted areas of the store opens up retailers to significant risks such as theft and compromised customer information, he said.

Levenberg suggests retailers hire temporary workers through an agency that conducts screening and background checks on employees. And, if they are hiring internally, he said retailers should conduct their own background and criminal checks, which are relatively inexpensive and can be done quickly.

Joe LaRocca, senior asset protection advisor with the National Retail Federation, said that more and more retailers are relying on each other to conduct checks on temporary employees. Utilizing mutual association checks, which is information gathered from different retailers about employees, can expedite the screening process. “Retailers have banded together and pooled negative or derogatory information about people,” he said. “We find more retailers are screening employees through systems like that.”

Retailers who grant access privileges to temporary workers must make sure they have the procedures in place to change codes or recall access cards when temporary workers are terminated. “We try to talk to people about clearly defining the roles of workers and how to automate this process,” said Todd Chambers, chief marketing officer of Courion, which provides identity and access management and compliance solutions. “We have solutions to help define roles for organizations and how they should define roles and what access a temporary worker has.” 

In addition to automating the process, it is critical that temporary employees be well supervised by permanent workers and are not given an extensive amount of responsibilities independent from other employees. “Giving data access, money, proprietary information and customer information is always something retailers are conscious of and careful about giving to temporary workers,” said LaRocca.

Monitoring employees systematically is also an important element to supervising temporary employees. It is important that retailers conduct exception-based reports to ensure that temporary employees are following correct store procedures. It is also important that retailers have properly functioning video surveillance and access control systems to monitor employees on the floor and in stockrooms.

Putting all these measures in place can be challenging considering the time and budget restraints that retailers face during the holiday season. “Stores are making good decisions, but they’re having to make them quickly so their guidelines for temporary employees aren’t always as consistent as with their permanent, year-round workers,” said LaRocca. “They do the best they can with their time and budget restraints and the talent that’s available.”