What I have found is that most of the time, a temp worker is a temp worker for a reason.
Boy, do I totally agree with you!
As someone who has supervised anywhere from 2 to 20 temps for 10 - 12 months at a time over the last 5 years I have come to the very same conclusion.
In fact, when someone really good comes to work with us I know they won't stay which is fine but it's tough to replace a good worker etc. The three really excellent people I have re-hired several times have unique situations that allow them to choose to work temporary jobs for our company. They are wives of employed spouses or hold weekend or evening jobs as well. Since I can't offer them any real advancement just a slightly higher per hour pay I feel very lucky and thankful that they keep coming back! I give them whatever flexibility the job allows in hours etc. to keep them.
As for the typical temp worker I have supervised, I could write a 20 page single-spaced essay about temporary employee characteristics and oddities! And my company uses an independent temp agency that gives every potential placement 1 - 2 days of interviews and testing before sending out them for interviews compared to the two companies we used on a trial basis who didn't screen well and didn't seem to care when a temp proved to be problematic.
Here's just a couple examples of what I've experienced supervising temps.
"The first person said I was rude to him and intolerant of his needs. And this was after I moved him to the only cubicle that hugged a wall since he had some sort of phobia thus forcing someone else to move as well. I also changed his lunch shift time so he could eat his lunch when he first came to work because he was afraid if he kept his lunch in the group's refrigerator someone would "harm his food". When he had a car accident and was home for a month I allowed him to keep delaying his return because the weather was hard on his knees at the ripe age of 23.......His heavy cologne drove other employees nuts and aggravated the asthma of another so I nicely asked him not to wear it as our employee policy states. That's when he complained and I got called into HR. Luckily, my supervisor decided that when we had to reduce our numbers he would be one of the ones to go first. Oh, I forgot to add that he explained that the heavy cologne was necessary because he had some sort of leak in his car that he was trying to cover up
The second time...a last-minute temp was hired for us without an interview due to a timesheet support problem we had to cope with out-of-nowhere. By the third day I knew that she was a "nut case" who couldn't understand simple instructions, told callers the exact answer we trained her never to use, wrote caller phone numbers down wrong and panicked when confronted with even the slightest crisis. After I spoke with her one-on-one about correcting some of these things, she started screaming at me in front of the 20 people I supervise. Luckily, I had been keeping a written log of issues so her complaint to HR was balanced with my notes. Interestingly enough, the HR person who had done her orientation realized that she had shown problem behaviors even at orientation so I was backed up completely. Still a horrible experience and unnecessary as it turned out since HR should never have sent her to us.
By the way, this is my second career after 30+ years in education so I have applied lots of what I learned as a department head those years. I'm still upset when an employee complains but I do realize that there are always people whom I will not get along with and have to deal with. It's not usually personal to me per se but it's still hurts. I want to do well as a supervisor and still be liked as a person - that's a very hard balance to keep!"
Good luck!
Maybe we should start a thread about odd behaviors fellow employees and temporaries we have worked with display.....
It would find it reassuring to see that these people don't just gravitate to my company.
