A few customers have asked what the best practice is for using Kin with a team that’s a mix of contractors and permanent employees. It really comes down to two features in Kin: managing time off, and managing paperwork.
First, what’s the difference between employees in Kin?
If you’ve added a couple of employees to Kin, you’ll notice there is a field to designate what kind of team member they are: contract, full-time, and part-time.
These fields are informational only. That means there’s no difference in the user’s permissions or anything else in Kin. It’s purely for your use and will come in handy down the road when we release reporting.
The Employee Type field found on the employee profile page.
Time off policies for contractors and freelancers.
As you may know, you can create as many time-off policies in Kin as you’d like. So, creating unique policies for each type of employee you have makes sense. We’ll use your vacation policy as an example.
Create individual policies called “Vacation-Permanent” and “Vacation-Contractor”, then apply the applicable balances and accrual types to each. Next, under the eligibility for each policy, assign the appropriate employees/workers.
When each employee signs into Kin, they’ll only see the time-off policies and balances for which they’re eligible, not all three.
You can rinse and repeat this process for each type of policy you have at your company. For example, we have 3 types of policies at our company: Vacation, Sick Days, and Conference Days.
Create distinct time-off policies for permanent and contract employees.
Managing files
Files work in much the same way as time-off policies. You can upload as many files as you want, and use categories to organize the documents which are specific to contractors and permanents (or both).
In terms of permissions, files are all one-to-one. So, Kin doesn’t distinguish between groups or employee-types when you choose with whom a file gets shared. So, just like with any file, select the people (contractors or permanents) to whom a unique copy of the file should be sent and only those folks will have individual access to it.
Use categories to organize contractor-only files.