Your employees are one of your greatest assets. However, too often, organizations struggle to manage their human resources and plan for the future.
Plagued by turnover, skills gaps, overemployment, low productivity, and ever-changing business landscapes, it’s no wonder that businesses struggle to keep up. However, a strategic staffing plan can mitigate these issues.
Use the following tips to learn how to develop a staffing plan that puts the right people in the right place at the right time.
What is a staffing plan?
A staffing plan is a strategic planning process by which a company (typically led by the HR team) assesses and identifies the personnel needs of the organization. In other words, a good staffing plan helps you understand the number and types of employees your organization needs to accomplish its goals.
A staffing plan answers the questions:
- What work needs to be done?
- How many people do we need to employ?
- What skills and experience are necessary to do this work?
- What skills gaps need to be filled (and are there any redundancies)?
Staffing plans can encompass the entire company or apply to smaller teams or departments and even individual projects.
For example, if your company’s business goals focus on expanding its salesforce in the coming year, a staffing plan can help prepare the sales department for that growth—so that the right people with the right skills are brought on board at the right times.
Additionally, a staffing plan helps your business to:
- Reduce labor costs and maximize productivity.
- Eliminate skills gaps.
- Increase employee engagement.
- Increase employee retention and reduce turnover.
- Improve customer experience.
- Streamline business growth.
Having a clear staffing plan helps prevent issues that could delay growth or hinder the quality of your products and services, which could result in unhappy customers and lost business opportunities.
Staffing plans help companies effectively recruit, hire, and develop employees. They also help guide budgeting and financial decisions within the organization.
How to calculate staffing needs
A staffing plan involves three main steps:
- Determine current staffing levels.
- Forecast future staffing needs.
- Identify the gaps between the two.
Once you’ve assessed your staffing needs, you can outline recommendations for how to address those needs, which might include recruiting and hiring new talent, promoting internally, focusing on training and employee development, or adding contractors to your staff. These forecasts and recommendations will help you develop your overall human resources plan for the organization.
Use the following steps to learn how to calculate staffing needs and make a plan for the future.
1. Identify the business goals
Before you dive into staffing plans and changes, determine what the overarching goals are for the business. These goals are typically outlined in a strategic business plan. Use this plan to clarify the company’s objectives and align the staffing plan accordingly.
What you do with your staff will affect business outcomes (for better or for worse), so you want to make sure the two plans align.
For instance, if the business plans to open a new location, you may need to move current staff around or hire new employees to fill those roles. The business plan will help inform those staffing decisions.
2. Determine your current staffing situation
To develop a staffing plan, you must first understand your current staffing environment.
If you have a robust HR database, this step could be reasonably straightforward. However, if you host personnel information on multiple sources, you will first need to consolidate that data into a single source of truth. Work with business leaders and managers to help you ensure accurate and complete data on your human resources.
Once you have your staffing data in one place, you can assess the current staffing environment and begin to pull actionable insights from the data.
Pay particular attention to:
- The number of people on staff
- Staff distribution (team size and who works where)
- Skills and competencies within the workforce
- High performers and potential leaders
- Low performers or “flight risks” who could indicate turnover
- Staff age and tenure (to anticipate retirement numbers)
Using these data will help you better understand the current staffing landscape and more accurately identify future staffing needs and opportunities.
Lucidchart can help you assess your current staff and gain new insights. Import employee data directly into Lucidchart to build an org chart or group employees in Smart Containers by role, competencies, performance, and more. Visualizing your workforce can help you identify important relationships, correlations, or gaps in staffing.
