Multi-Site Operations: Tips for Managing Teams Across Locations
August 12, 2025
As organizations expand, multi-site operations have become increasingly common in healthcare, education, government, and other industries. However, coordinating teams across multiple locations can be a challenge, sometimes resulting in inconsistent communication and decentralized decision-making. Hiring temporary staff, preferably through a reputable staffing agency, may help you overcome these issues and scale your operations.
Complexities of Multi-Site Staffing
Each of your locations will likely have very different staffing needs. For example, some sites may require more team members than others.
Managing staff across various locations involves scheduling tasks, communicating with different team members, and enhancing productivity remotely, sometimes from a different time zone. This can be tough, especially if there's miscommunication or delays in sharing information. You'll also need to uphold safety standards from afar and ensure different sites comply with local regulations.
Common Pitfalls for Multi-Location Managers
Some obstacles you might face when managing multi-site teams include:
Differences in staffing quality
Each of your sites may have different training and onboarding practices, resulting in varying levels of quality across sites. For example, staff in one warehouse might have manufacturing skills that staff in other warehouses lack.
An overdependence on key team members
Key team members at some sites, such as supervisors and managers, may have different approaches to work and day-to-day operations. If staff become dependent on these key team members, it can create inconsistencies in your organization.
Disorganized onboarding and inconsistent training
Without a centralized approach to onboarding and training, staff members at different locations will likely learn very different skills, potentially resulting in inconsistent performance across sites.
Limited visibility into performance and staffing gaps
You might struggle to track performance or staffing levels when you have distributed teams in different places. Issues like poor productivity or a lack of staff may go unnoticed with such limited visibility.
Best Practices for Multi-Location Managers
Standardized staffing operations, workflows, and processes ensure consistency within your organization. However, you'll also want to customize certain practices to fit the needs of each of your local teams. For example, you may need to adjust staffing levels depending on the location.
Additionally, set up communication systems across all your sites to ensure multi-site teams are always aligned. You can do this by hosting organization-wide meetings and sharing information through a platform like Slack.
For even better results, consider appointing leads at each site who report back to your location. You can empower them through ongoing training and incentives.
How Temp Staffing Helps Streamline Multi-Site Operations
One of the best ways to improve performance across multi-site locations is to hire temp staff. Doing so can address any staff shortages at a particular site, help you scale operations during peak periods, and cover personnel who are off sick. Temp staff can standardize operations across multiple locations by adhering to your quality standards and processes.
The best temp staffing agencies quickly deploy trained workers across multiple sites for you, removing the need for interviews, training, and onboarding. A centralized partner can offer localized support by providing high-quality staff in a particular area, helping you manage operations across different locations.
Scalable staffing partnerships can improve visibility and accountability for multi-site location managers in several ways. For example, you'll have a single point of contact for resolving staffing issues rather than dealing with multiple agencies.
Get the Support You Need for Multi-Site Workforce Coordination
You'll likely encounter various challenges with multi-site teams, such as inconsistent training and limited visibility into performance. Ways to overcome these obstacles include improving communication and customizing practices with local or regional workforce solutions.
Operating multiple locations with temp staffing is another good idea. Working with a staffing partner with both national reach and local expertise can ensure staffing quality in every single one of your locations.
Snelling offers staffing solutions based on your requirements. Whether you're looking to hire new staff at a particular location or improve staffing visibility across sites, we can help. With over 250 locally owned and operated branches, we have the experience and expertise to scale your workforce, wherever they are in the world.
Explore Snelling’s staffing solutions for multi-location organizations such as schools, distributors, healthcare companies, and government departments today.