Hours of work: part-time, full-time and flexible hours

1. Part-time: working fewer hours than the business's standard week, often evenings and weekends only.
   1. The business buys cover exactly when customers arrive and pays nothing for the quiet hours, so a Saturday rush can be staffed for a few hundred pounds a month rather than by funding a whole extra full-time post.
   2. The employee can fit the job around college or caring for a relative, but total pay is lower because pay follows the hours worked.
   3. The cost is continuity, since three part-timers need three lots of training and a rota, and a customer may deal with a different face on every visit.
2. Full-time: working the standard week, usually somewhere around 35 to 40 hours.
   1. The business has the same people available every day, and they build up experience of its products, its systems and its regular customers, which makes spending money on their training worthwhile.
   2. The employee gets a steady income they can budget on and usually better benefits, such as paid holiday, sick pay and a workplace pension.
   3. Those wages have to be paid in a quiet week as well as a busy one, so a fall in demand cuts straight into profit before the business can cut its wage bill.
3. Flexible hours: staff choose their own start and finish times inside limits set by the employer, often around a core period when everyone has to be there.
   1. The business keeps staff who would otherwise leave for an employer that offers it, and the phones stay answered across a longer day because early starters and late finishers overlap.
   2. The employee controls their own time, so a parent can start at 7.30am and still collect a child at 3pm without giving up hours.
   3. Cover becomes harder to guarantee, because an 8am delivery or a team meeting can find half the staff not yet in, so the employer has to fix core hours and plan the rota round them.

Contracts: permanent, temporary and freelance

The three sit in a clear order on the four things an owner weighs before offering work to anybody.

1. Continuity is what the permanent row buys, since staff who know the regular customers keep them coming back and training paid for in year one is still earning in year three, though cutting that team back later means notice periods and redundancy pay.
2. A temporary contract lets a garden centre carry its spring peak or a warehouse cover a six-week Christmas run without carrying those wages in February, but each new intake has to be trained again, which eats into the saving if the peak comes round every year.
3. Freelance work buys a specialist only for the hours the skill is needed, which is how Gymshark used fitness influencers to sell online rather than employing a marketing department, but the business controls the result far less than it controls an employee and has no guarantee that the same person is free next time.

Judging the mix: what the right pattern of working depends on

1. How much demand varies through the year: a seaside cafe that takes most of its revenue between June and September would run out of cash paying a permanent full-time team through the winter, so the peak belongs on part-time and temporary contracts.
2. Whether the work needs specialist skills: a skill used twice a year, such as rebuilding a website, is cheaper bought freelance, because a specialist on the payroll is paid for the ten months nobody needs them.
3. How much the business values continuity with its customers: a hairdresser or a dentist keeps customers partly because the same person sees them each visit, so permanent staff protect revenue in a way a stream of temporary faces cannot.
4. What the business can afford: a start-up with £5,000 behind it cannot promise permanent wages before the sales arrive, so it opens with part-time and freelance help and makes posts permanent once the revenue is predictable.
5. Most businesses therefore settle on a permanent core sized to their quietest month, with part-time, flexible, temporary and freelance workers layered on top for the peaks, because the core protects quality and customer relationships while the layer stops the wage bill becoming a fixed cost the business cannot cover when demand drops.