How to Get More Value From Temporary Workers: The Insights Most Businesses Miss

Temporary workers can give your business far more than additional capacity.

Because they enter an organisation with fresh eyes, they can spot operational bottlenecks, outdated processes, ineffective tools, management behaviours, cultural inconsistencies and skills gaps that permanent teams may simply have become accustomed to.

After more than 20 years of placing professional temporary workers into UK businesses, I’ve seen their observations help shape developing teams, change systems and tools, challenge ways of working and even help businesses evolve what they offer while the work is happening.

Yet most organisations never ask them what they see.

We bring temporary people in to solve a problem. Extra capacity, specialist skills, project support, maternity cover or simply more hands during a busy period.

They do the job. The assignment finishes. We thank them, collect the laptop and move on.

It’s often treated as a transaction.

I think that’s a missed opportunity.

Why is feedback from temporary workers so valuable?

Temporary workers occupy an unusually useful position in a business.

They’re close enough to see how your organisation really operates, but new enough that they haven’t become accustomed to it yet.

A permanent employee joining the same team may have exactly the same fresh perspective. But six weeks into a permanent role, they’re also trying to pass probation.

They’re learning the politics, working out who has influence and being understandably careful about upsetting the wrong person.

A temporary worker has a different relationship with the organisation. They know their assignment has an end date and, in my experience, that can make for a much more candid conversation.

Over the years, I’ve had temps feed back observations that have helped shape developing teams. They’ve identified bottlenecks that permanent teams had simply learned to work around. Their experiences have contributed to businesses changing the tools and systems people were using.

We’ve seen organisations use two temporary teams to test different ways of delivering something and evolve the offering while the work was actually happening.

And I’ve heard temporary workers carefully question hierarchies and ways of working that nobody inside the organisation seemed to be questioning anymore.

None of those people were brought in as management consultants.

They were simply new enough to notice.

Talk to temporary workers while they’re there

Don’t wait until the last day of an assignment to ask a temporary worker what they think.

Regular check-ins shouldn’t simply be:

“Everything okay?”

Ask better questions.

What’s making the job harder than it needs to be?

What surprised you when you arrived?

Where are you losing time?

What have you seen done differently elsewhere?

What doesn’t make sense to you?

What would you change if you could?

And listen to the answers.

You aren’t just checking whether the temporary worker is happy. You’re gathering information about how your business operates.

Onboard temporary workers properly

If you’ve decided somebody is capable and trustworthy enough to work inside your organisation, give them what they reasonably need to succeed.

That doesn’t mean every temporary worker should automatically have exactly the same access as every permanent employee. Security, confidentiality and the nature of the assignment obviously matter.

But unnecessarily restricting access to systems, facilities, information, relevant meetings or team communication simply because someone is temporary can make it harder for them to do the job you’ve hired them to do.

If somebody spends the first two weeks of an eight-week assignment waiting for access to a system, that’s not simply a poor temp experience.

That’s operational data.

How quickly can your organisation mobilise somebody when you urgently need additional capacity?

Where are your processes getting stuck?

How many paid hours are being lost?

Would a permanent new starter encounter exactly the same problem?

Those are useful things for a leadership team to know.

Can temporary workers tell you how your managers are really performing?

I think this is one of the most overlooked opportunities.

Founders, CEOs and HR Directors spend significant amounts of time defining company values, leadership behaviours and culture.

But how do you know how consistently those things are being delivered several layers down, particularly in teams doing mission-critical work in real time?

Ask the people experiencing them for the first time.

Did their manager know they were arriving?

Were expectations clear?

Were they included appropriately?

Did they receive feedback?

Were they comfortable asking questions?

Were they treated with the same basic respect as permanent colleagues?

And importantly:

Did their experience inside your organisation resemble the values you say you have?

Culture isn’t what is written on the wall.

Culture is what happens when senior leadership isn’t in the room.

Sometimes the person sitting in a team for six weeks can tell you something about a manager, process or culture that you simply won’t see from the boardroom.

You’re not just checking on the temp.

You’re spot-checking your business.

Should temporary workers have exit interviews?

Yes, I think they should.

If your organisation regularly uses temporary workers, I’d encourage Founders, HRDs and other senior leaders to occasionally conduct an exit conversation themselves.

Not every temp.

Take a sample across different teams, managers, functions and levels.

And no role should be deemed too junior, too temporary or too short-term for that person’s experience to matter.

Ask what worked. What didn’t. Where they lost time. What surprised them. What they’d change. Who impressed them. Whether they’d work for you again.

And ask:

“Did your experience here match what we say our organisation stands for?”

Don’t only listen for problems either.

Over the years, we’ve heard countless temporary workers identify brilliant managers, strong processes and better ways of working too.

Fresh eyes can tell you what’s worth protecting just as readily as what’s worth changing.

What if you don’t feel comfortable holding the conversation yourself?

If you’re a smaller business, don’t have an internal HR team, or simply think a temporary worker may be more candid speaking to someone outside the organisation, ask your recruitment agency to hold the conversation for you.

We do this for clients.

A good agency already has a relationship with the worker and provides some distance between the individual and the business. That can make it easier for somebody to speak openly about their experience.

The conversation can be treated confidentially, with themes and observations fed back to the client without unnecessarily attributing individual comments. There will, of course, be circumstances where serious safeguarding, legal or misconduct concerns need to be handled differently.

But for ordinary workforce feedback, that independence can be incredibly useful.

A temp might not feel comfortable telling the Founder that their manager barely spoke to them.

They might not tell the HR Director that the culture they experienced looked nothing like the culture described during onboarding.

They may tell us.

And if you’re using several temporary workers, the insight becomes even more valuable because your agency can start identifying patterns across assignments, teams or managers.

One person struggling to get system access may be an isolated issue.

Five people saying the same thing is data.

What should you ask temporary workers?

You don’t need a complicated employee survey.

Some of the most useful questions are straightforward:

1. What surprised you when you joined us?
2. What made your job harder than it needed to be?
3. Where did you see time being wasted?
4. What worked particularly well?
5. What have you experienced elsewhere that we could learn from?
6. Did you have the systems, information and access you needed?
7. How effectively was the team managed?
8. Did anything about our structure or hierarchy make the work more difficult?
9. Did your experience match the values we say we have?
10. If you were running this team, what would you change?
11. Would you work here again?
12. What haven’t I asked you that you think I should know?

That final question can sometimes be the most interesting one.

Use temporary workers to help shape what you hire next

This is where I think this becomes particularly important now.

Hiring the right people for your business is becoming more challenging.

Roles are changing. AI is changing how work gets done. And the skills you needed two years ago aren’t necessarily the ones you’ll need next.

Temporary hiring gives businesses an opportunity not just to deliver work, but to learn while that work is happening.

Over the course of an assignment, you can learn where the real bottlenecks are, which skills make the biggest difference, where responsibilities should sit, whether your hierarchy is helping or hindering, which tools need changing and sometimes whether the role you thought you needed is actually the right role at all.

I’ve seen temporary teams help businesses answer those questions in real time.

So when a temp leaves, don’t just ask whether they did a good job.

Ask what their time inside your business has taught you about what you need next.

That’s where temporary hiring can have an impact long after the assignment ends.

Frequently asked questions about temporary workers

Should temporary workers receive the same onboarding as permanent employees?

Temporary workers should receive the onboarding, information, system access and support reasonably required to perform their assignment successfully. This won’t necessarily be identical to permanent employee onboarding, but temporary status shouldn’t mean somebody is left without the tools or context they need to do the job.

How often should managers check in with temporary workers?

There isn’t one frequency that suits every assignment, but don’t leave feedback until the end. Regular conversations during an assignment allow businesses to identify problems, remove obstacles and learn from the worker while there is still time to act on what they’re seeing.

Should temporary workers have exit interviews?

I believe businesses that regularly use temporary workers should include them in their feedback process. This might be an exit conversation with the manager, a senior leader or an independent conversation conducted by the recruitment agency.

Can a recruitment agency conduct temporary worker exit interviews?

Yes. An agency can provide an independent feedback channel between the temporary worker and the client. This can be particularly valuable for smaller businesses without an internal HR function or where workers may feel more comfortable giving candid feedback to somebody outside the organisation.

Where appropriate, feedback can be anonymised or aggregated so that leaders can identify recurring themes without every comment being attributed to an individual worker.

Can temporary workers help identify skills gaps?

Yes. Temporary workers can help businesses understand which skills are genuinely required to deliver the work, where capability is missing and whether responsibilities sit in the right roles or teams.

That insight can then inform future temporary and permanent hiring decisions.

Can temporary workers provide useful feedback about company culture?

Yes. Because temporary workers experience managers, teams, onboarding and working practices first-hand, their feedback can provide an additional perspective on whether stated organisational values and leadership behaviours are being experienced consistently in practice.

Temporary talent can give you more than capacity

Temporary workers are usually brought into businesses because of what they can do.

After more than 20 years of working with them, I’d encourage leaders to pay just as much attention to what they can see.

Bring them in properly.

Give them what they reasonably need to succeed.

Talk to them regularly.

Listen to their observations.

And occasionally let someone senior hear those observations directly.

Every temporary worker gives you a small window into how your organisation actually operates.

Don’t close it without looking through it.

And use what you learn to make the next hire better.

Considering temporary talent?

If you’re thinking about bringing temporary people or a temporary team into your business, start with what you’re trying to achieve.

Yellow Bricks can help you work out the people and skills you need, how quickly the workforce can be built and what it will cost.

Start a hiring project →

Learn more about Temporary Recruitment

Written by Abby Robbins, the Founder of Yellow Bricks, who has more than 20 years’ experience in recruitment and temporary workforce solutions, working with UK businesses to build temporary teams and make better workforce decisions.