Regardless of your industry, your professional team members are crucial in determining your venture’s success. All managers and business leaders can attest that simply hiring employees is not enough. You must manage staff in a mutually beneficial manner—ensuring workers are satisfied while maximizing their value-add to your business.
A staffing management plan documents how an organization plans to acquire staff to meet the needs of a particular project, department, or business as a whole.
Ineffective people management can severely hamper other units of your business, while effective people management can help you leverage synergies and drive exceptional results. The human resources (HR) function is a core component of any company, whether it is an integral department or an outsourced operation.
While building a staffing management plan takes substantial time and effort, using one can be a big help in driving effectiveness. This can be good for the business’s bottom-line results and valuable for team members for short-term job satisfaction and longer-term career aspirations.
For many businesses, worker compensation makes up one of the largest chunks of their total cost. When you invest in human resources, it’s important to ensure that you position your talent in a manner that maximizes your return. Timely hiring, allocating tasks, planning timelines, monitoring tasks, collaboration, and team building are important aspects of a people and project management plan (PMP). A staffing management plan (SMP) can help your firm achieve these goals by fine-tuning your human resource management.
Staffing management plan (SMP) definition
An SMP is a multi-faceted tool that allows you to identify, hire, and manage the right people for particular project work within your company, across all levels and departments. Simply put, it helps you organize and plan your resources depending on your company’s needs. The best SMPs are often specific to your context. Design the option you use in a manner that complements your company’s structure, business model, and project requirements.
You cannot start a project, let alone complete it, without the right people. To find the right people, you need to identify the project’s requirements.
Start by answering these questions:
- What are your business goals and objectives?
- What do you wish to achieve?
- What are your deliverables?
- What is your total time frame?
Depending on your answers to these questions, you can start narrowing down your labor requirements:
- How many team members do you need?
- What skill sets do you need?
- Do you need team members to be contractual or full-time?
- How will you hire them?
- What do you need to invest in training them?
One of the biggest differences between hiring contractual and full-time workers is that full-time employees are on the company’s payroll. People who are hired on a full-time basis are usually also eligible for various other benefits, such as health insurance, paid vacation time, and parental leave.
Contractual staff isn’t placed on your payroll, and they don’t usually qualify for employee benefits. However, many contractual staff eventually do become full-time, so short-term contracting can be a good way to assess candidates before bringing them onto your team.
With the answers to the above questions, you have the starting information to build a successful staffing management plan for your business. Let’s review what to include in an SMP.
What should a staffing management plan include?
The primary aim of an SMP is to help you engage team members with the perfect skill set at the right time to ensure the smooth functioning of your projects. With that in mind, it’s good to know what goes into creating a solid SMP.
Let’s review a few of the key points to include.
- Roles and responsibilities. First, understand the nuances and needs of your project or long-term operations. In particular, ask yourself what you wish to achieve and deliver through project execution. This will immediately allow you to determine the number of people you need and, more importantly, their specific skill sets. Make a list of roles required for the tasks and mention the respective responsibilities. Further, each role and responsibility mentioned should have a corresponding proficiency and skill set required. Be sure to consider both hard and soft skills. You can also highlight how your ideal project team will work. Do certain functions require collaboration? In what combinations will your staff work to maximize their output? Establishing the project roles and responsibilities section is the backbone of your SMP. It will help you with the subsequent aspects of SMP creation, such as establishing a timeline, drafting a project plan, and hiring staff.
- Resource calendars. Having an appropriate timeline that describes when resources will be needed and for how long is a vital component of your project. This should highlight when the recruitment process will begin, identify important project milestones, and suggest whether you should hire contractually or full-time. You may want to use histograms, organizational charts, or other data visualization methodology to make the SMP more interactive.
This component of the SMP helps keep everyone, including senior management and staff, on the same page. Providing structure to your team is crucial to helping them thrive.
- Staff acquisition. Depending on your company’s staffing requirements, you need to decide whether you’ll find staff internally or externally. This element also highlights the costs of engaging each individual and the expertise they bring to your company.
Your staff acquisition strategies should be appropriate for your specific requirements and external factors. For example, given that more than 50% of the workforce is engaged in a job compatible with remote work, you should use digital staffing strategies to access the best candidates from a broad global talent pool.
Ensure that your website’s job portal is updated and mobile-friendly, refine your virtual interview experience and create a smooth online onboarding process for your potential workers.
Also, consider the various mechanisms through which you can hire staff. While staffing agencies are a popular avenue for staff acquisition, some hiring managers report discontent with these groups due to quality assurance, time, and cost issues. Alternatives to consider for hiring include campus recruitment, LinkedIn and other social media platforms, referrals and networking, and work platforms like Upwork.
Other common factors to include in your SMP are a staff release plan, a training plan, training needs, rewards and recognition, compliance, and safety. Plan details depend on the company, stakeholders, and project needs. Regardless of how you structure your SMP, the finished product should be coherent and self-explanatory.
Need help drafting an SMP that includes all these key points? Look to the professionals on Upwork who can ensure your SMP is comprehensive and can point your organization in the right direction.
How to create a staffing management plan
While creating an SMP, you should keep the objectives of your project and company in mind. What do you wish to achieve by creating and using this plan? Considering the following objectives and incorporating them into your SMP will help your plan succeed.
1. Build a team
It’s not enough to simply hire people and tell them what to do. Your approach should ensure that every project team member feels valued. You can do this by defining their roles and responsibilities and highlighting how their contribution will help the rest of the team and the organization in total.
Providing clarity, work breakdown structure, and purpose to your workers will help them understand how they fit into the larger unit.
Consider the group dynamics and the nature of the tasks. Is the project or task collaborative? Does it require a cross-functional approach? If yes, you must ensure that the people you assign to the team are compatible with existing staff members, especially if you plan to make external hires. Every person’s work should complement others to foster diverse perspectives and collaborative thinking.
2. Organize communication channels
Most successful businesses have channels that facilitate efficient communication across various teams. Keeping related departments in conversation with one another can help prevent delays and mistakes. Businesses try to avoid the “silo thinking” that drives optimization within individual departments and instead encourage cross-departmental efforts to achieve the best results for the overall organization.
This might be challenging to achieve if you hire a large number of new or contractual staff. Quickly adjusting to new company culture can be difficult, creating a situation where communication might be compromised. An SMP bridges this gap between existing staff members and newly engaged resources by raising awareness of their roles and enabling communication across teams.
Vertical communication between low to mid-tier workers and senior management is also essential. Your staff’s morale can suffer if they feel isolated from senior management, reducing productivity. An SMP keeps everyone on the same page, improving communication across your organizational hierarchy regardless of any individual’s position.
3. Improve team efficiency
The primary purpose of any SMP is to help you organize and make your operations efficient and effective. With that in mind, you should focus on content and structure to maximize the SMP’s impact on efficiency.
Make your content clear, concise, and coherent. Most importantly, ensure it fits the context of your project and makes sense to those who will carry out the work. Structure your SMP in a creative and accessible manner. Use tables, infographics, and dynamic graphs to make the messaging visually appealing and easily understood. Your staff’s ability to comprehend and follow your SMP closely will improve if you structure it well.
Lastly, consider if your team needs any external interventions to improve their efficiency. If your team lacks skills, it might be more viable to train them instead of hiring new people. For example, you can update your staff on technological advances to boost their productivity. Your SMP should mention the skill gaps that need to be bridged and make recommendations accordingly.
4. Incorporate consultants and other outside help
Using external consultants can make your SMP more dynamic. You can staff up or down based on your project requirements over time. Moreover, hiring outside talent can save the time and cost of training in-house employees. Consultants typically specialize in a particular field and can bring their expertise to your team.
Project lifecycles and company workload may vary by season. Consequently, hiring full-time employees when they may be needed for only a short duration can adversely impact your profitability. You can use your SMP to gauge if and when you require external help and precisely figure out what skill sets you to need.
Staffing management plan template
Even a relatively simple SMP can have a sizable impact on your management by streamlining operations. For reference, review this sample staffing management plan that details the roles, responsibilities, skills, number of staff, and staffing time frame necessary for a project.
Use this template to start creating your SMP. Set up a living spreadsheet document.
Depending on the needs of your project, you can opt for more sophisticated online tools to create your SMPs. These tend to be more dynamic and encompass a greater amount of information. Additionally, there is more potential to update them and make them interactive.
Get expert help with your staffing needs
If you’re investing most of your money in hiring staff, you must be able to select the best talent, manage them well, and ensure that everyone is delivering value.
While people management can seem like a daunting task, you may choose to use Talent Scout™ when looking to fill your skills gaps. You will partner with specialized recruiters who are adept at understanding the requirements of your business. They use advanced tools like machine learning to curate a list of ideal talent for your required skills before interacting with them to understand whether they would fit your team culture. This helps you scale up and down to match the needs of your organization over time.
