Field notes › Running the business
Keeping good casuals between swings
The most expensive worker in labour hire is the good one who does not come back. You recruited them, inducted them, paid for tickets in some cases, and they learned the client's site well enough that the supervisor asks for them by name. Then the season ends, four weeks pass, and they are working for someone else.
Retention between swings is not a culture problem. It is mostly an operations problem, made of small habits that either keep someone attached to your business or quietly detach them.
Silence is what loses people
The single biggest factor is whether anything happens in the gap. A worker who hears nothing for a month has no reason to believe another swing is coming, so when someone else rings with a start date, they take it. They are not being disloyal, they are responding to the only concrete offer in front of them.
The fix is not a newsletter. It is being specific: what you expect the next start to be, even approximately, and telling them when that estimate changes. An honest we think early October, we will know by mid-September is worth more than a vague we will be in touch.
Make it easy for them to stay visible
The other half is whether staying on your books requires effort from them. If keeping their availability current means ringing the office, most people will not, and then they look unavailable exactly when you are trying to crew the next season.
Availability the worker can set themselves, from a phone, in under a minute, is the mechanism. In Mustr workers drag out the days they can work, and there is a nightly reminder when their availability is running low, with the cadence set by your office. That reminder is doing quiet retention work: it is a small, useful contact that also happens to keep your bench accurate.
Keep their record intact, keep their seat free
There is a practical tension here. You want to keep the worker's records, but nobody wants to pay for logins that are not being used, and an inactive person cluttering every roster picker causes mistakes.
That is exactly what an inactive state is for. Set someone inactive between swings and they keep every certificate, shift and note, they stop appearing when you build the roster, they stop being chased by reminders they cannot act on, and their login is suspended, so they drop out of the user count your plan bills on. One button brings them back with their history intact.
The important part is that keeping records is no longer a cost. When retaining a worker's file costs money, offices start deleting people, and then next season starts with a re-induction that was not necessary.
Chase the ticket, not just the person
The gap between swings is the best time to sort renewals, and almost nobody uses it. A ticket that expires in the off-season is a ticket that can be renewed calmly, in a group booking, instead of urgently in week one.
Run the expiry list at the end of a season, not the start of the next one. It is the same list either way. Done early it is a training plan, done late it is a staffing shortage.
Be honest about the next season's shape
Workers make decisions on the information they have. If next season is genuinely smaller, saying so early costs you some people, and it keeps the ones you tell honestly. If it is bigger, saying so is a recruitment advantage that costs nothing.
The failure is saying nothing, because silence gets interpreted as bad news by the people with options, who are the ones you most want back.
Ask the ones who did not come back
Once a season, ring three people who did not return and ask why. Not a survey. A phone call. The answers are usually specific and fixable: they were not told when the next start was, they got a start date somewhere else two weeks earlier, the site did not suit them, the pay ran late once.
Every one of those is an operational fact rather than a mystery about loyalty, and most of them are cheaper to fix than to recruit around.
More on the worker side of this is on the worker portal page, and casual churn and onboarding covers the getting-them-started half.