Don’t have enough time to take care of necessary yet mundane tasks? You could hire an intern, but that seems like such a hassle — because you’ll have to train him. A better option may be to enlist one of several new services that offer temporary help with everything from distributing promotional flyers to assembling office furniture.

In the past, you may have hired a bookkeeper to handle your ledgers, a web guru to manage your website and social media outreach, or a virtual assistant to take care of your correspondence. These days, services like TaskRabbit, Zaarly, and Postmates offer additional types of assistance as needed, such as helping out when you get a sudden influx of business.

TaskRabbit, for example, offers a network of “rabbits” who can help you with virtually anything. You post the job, the deadline, and the price you’d like to pay. Available rabbits nearby respond with bids; you review their profiles and expertise and then hire one.

Of course, outsourcing comes with caveats: You may not be able to find someone in your price range or with the right skills for a particular task. And many services are available only in major metropolitan areas.

Ready to hand off your grunt work? Here are three tips for getting started:

• Calculate how much your time is worth. Could that hour it takes you to make a delivery across town be better used trying to attract new customers or finishing up a project? Figure out whether it makes financial sense to outsource a particular job.
• Set clear expectations. Describe your task as specifically as possible, setting goals and a deadline. Before you pick someone, ask questions and gauge his or her ability to complete your job. Has he done this before? Does she have the necessary tools and equipment?
• Get creative. Outsourcing could be a low-cost way for you to test the waters on a new service, pamper your best clients with a surprise gift, or even meet new partners.

This past week, one of our concierges, Brad, decided to leave us for a new full-time job. That hadn’t happened in awhile, but it was a surprisingly easy transition (technically). However, I still had to dust off a few cobwebs to remember exactly what to do when an employee resigns.

My initial thought was to make sure that there were no outstanding client issues. No matter what, we have to take care of our clients first. But Brad is a conscientious guy, and he made sure that all of his clients had finished traveling before he left. So there wasn’t anything difficult to handle in that respect.

Next, I thought about all of the places where Brad had a presence in company materials. I needed to adjust those. To this end:

• I changed his email password and set his account to forward any messages to our general inbox, in case a client used it;
• I deleted his phone extension and re-recorded our company greeting, because it lists every person’s extension by name; and
• I removed his bio from the website and his extension from the contact page.

Once I’d handled the basic customer-facing tasks, it was time to turn inward. I had already paid his last check, so that wasn’t a concern. We had done this via email, which counted as a written notice, so we were set legally. I also made sure that our office chief knew not to send future clients to him.

Of course, I also emailed everyone else in the company to let them know that Brad was gone. I wanted to make sure they knew not only that he’d left, but also that he had done so to take another job (and not because of any internal issues with the company). I think people are always interested in knowing the real story behind someone’s departure. In this case, there was no juicy gossip to be had.

In the end, we will miss having Brad on our team, but the transition was about as painless as could be.

by Brett Snyder

With the economy still shaky in many parts of the country, small businesses continue to use part-time workers to staff their operations. Part-timers may cost less than full-timers, because they aren’t entitled to overtime pay or health benefits, but they can pose other challenges.

“When you’re not full-time, you feel different, and if you feel different, your productivity and morale might be impacted,” says George Boué, vice president of human resources at Stiles, a Florida-based real estate company.

Boué has blogged about effective strategies for managing temps and part-timers. Here are five of his tips:

1. Hold meetings when part-timers are present. Don’t exclude part-timers from meetings that pertain to them or expect them to come in for a meeting on their day off. “Nothing is worse than not being involved in a meeting that would make them feel left out,” Boué says. “Ensure that other team members are respectful of the fact that someone is part-time.” Including part-timers in important meetings makes them feel like they’re part of the team.
2. Set aside time to keep part-timers in the loop. Sometimes significant developments occur outside of meetings, and it’s important that part-timers know about these changes. Don’t expect part-timers to know what happened on their day off or assume that someone else will catch them up. “What I typically do is set aside five minutes or so where I meet with my part-timer and bring her up to speed on anything that’s taken place over the past day,” Boué says.
3. Maintain a consistent schedule. Some restaurants or retail locations change their employee’s shifts on a weekly basis, which doesn’t go over well with many employees, especially those piecing together several jobs. “Employees don’t like to have their schedules changed, because they’re changing their personal time,” Boué notes. “You should try to stick to a particular schedule out of consideration and give the individual enough advance notice [when it changes].”
4. Create policies for part-timers. “If you’re going to have part-timers, it’s a good idea to have brief policies about the benefits that part-timers can have,” Boué says. That way there’s no ambiguity over what benefits part-timers get (which is often a function of hours worked), and no one feels they’re being treated differently.
5. If you plan to hire someone full-time in the future, say so. Some part-timers, such as college students or the semi-retired, appreciate working a few shifts without being committed to a 40-hour work week. But many part-timers haven’t been able to find the full-time employment they want due to a tough job market, and they’d quickly jump ship if offered a full-time job. According to Boué, there’s not much you can do about that retention risk unless you (truthfully) plan to hire someone full-time in the future and communicate that plan to your part-timer.