Inside Santa's Workshop: Employer of Record Services

In the heart of the North Pole, amidst the twinkling lights and snowy mountains, lies Santa's Workshop. A place where hot cocoa is always brewing, the air smells of warm, gooey chocolate chip cookies & magic is sprinkled all around.

While everyone works tirelessly all year long, there is an extra special buzz come Q4 as all the final preparations are being made for Christmas Eve.

A few years ago, Santa came to us and expressed his concerns about toy production and creating an efficient, scalable business that would meet the demands of his customers. While we worked through the complexities of the Workshop functions, we felt it was best to partner and provide Santa with Employer of Record services for his scaling small business.

What is our Employer of Record (EOR) / Payroll Program?

It’s a comprehensive system to manage and support contingent workers, whether our customer found them or a third party did. From on-boarding and employment to off-boarding, we holistically maintain your program.

This includes:

To spread Christmas cheer, we wanted to share our newest case study and the top 3 ways EOR services impacted the work produced by Santa’s Workshop to make this 2023 holiday season such a success!

1. Simplified Payroll Program

At the end of the day, Santa’s Workshop is a small, family-owned and operated business. While he has permanent elves who work year-round, he does need to bring in temporary workers during certain seasons, especially on years when the nice list is over projected predictions. Santa is passionate about making a seamless, professional and friendly experience for all workers. That includes making sure there is efficient handling of those temporary elves.

We’ve stepped in to cover onboarding, keeping in mind all the specifics laid out in our very unique service-level agreement for this customer. Not only has this benefited the workshop’s production due to avoiding missed deadlines caused by low resources, but this has also become an attractive quality for the workers. The workshop is now known for being a best-in-class organization to join for seasonal hours.

In addition to a jolly onboarding experience, temporary elves enjoy accurate & timely weekly pay, HR support with quick response times with knowledgeable information, and access to competitive benefit packages. All this not only helps Santa gain access to great talent but keeps them merry on assignment and returning to work in later seasons. With talent retention top of mind (even in the North Pole) this creates a win-win-win scenario for all parties.

2. Saving Money & Spending Time Where It Matters Most

One of Santa’s biggest concerns was the focus he and his team needed to keep on the top 3 “tion”s.

Toy innovation, creation, and production.

His team simply could not keep meeting the high demand of their customers and stay on top of all the complexities of managing temporary staff. Between the tax-related compliance & unemployment insurance to fees and fines due to misclassification of workers, the risk was more than he could carry, even in his big, red bag. We saved him time and money by not having to source vendors for background checks, benefit programs, & contract negotiations, as well as monies saved should he be audited.

Outsourcing non-core HR functions to EOR specialists fit perfectly to remove the burdens Santa was taking on mentally and financially to free him up to go back to focusing on creating magical moments for all the children who needed him. Not to mention, through surveys we conducted with the contractors to gauge their experience, they all saw an uptick in the twinkle in his eyes following our go-live date.

3. Growth Long Term

Now that we have had some time to establish our processes with the Workshop, we’ve been looking forward to furthering our support with the growth Santa is anticipating in the coming years. The beauty of our partnership is that Santa can scale and descale his workforce with minimal effort on him or his team. With our consultative approach, we’ve been able to discover a potential need for access to a larger, international pool of talent and have begun building out immigration service offerings to implement through Q1 and Q2 of 2024.

While our current program is mainly built around onboarding and housing pre-identified workers, we have also begun implementing recruiting services. Because we know their business deeply from following onboarding processes and our overall relationship with Santa, we understand the qualities and skillsets the Workshop needs to function at its highest potential. Making recruiting efforts from our team very easy and effective.

To wrap this present up and put a beautiful bow on it, we have been able to come alongside the amazing work the Workshop does all year round to facilitate the white Christmas all the world dreams about every year. All while doing it in a way that enhanced efficiencies and compliance in their unique industry. We’re truly proud of this work and have even begun conversations with other businesses in Santa’s circle who have seen first-hand the impact it’s made on his organization (and sanity).

While we aren’t at liberty to disclose the “who” else we are in the planning phases with... let’s just say, there might be an extra pep in someone’s hop this coming spring 😉