The people who work for you are the backbone of your business, yet managing human resources can be difficult.
How do you know you have the right workers to help your company compete effectively? You need a staffing plan to ensure your company will be able to run efficiently and productively now and into the future.
This article explains everything you need to know about creating a staffing plan for your company. We’ll tell you what a staffing plan is and explain when you should use one. We’ll also provide steps you can follow to create your own.
What is a staffing plan?
A staffing plan is a living human resources (HR) document that a company makes and uses to understand and address the staffing needs of a business, a department within a business, or a particular project. The plan maps out how the company will fill those personnel needs.
In other words, a staffing plan helps businesses find their ideal matches in terms of needs and availability of staff, skills, and training.
When you create a staffing plan, you need to account for specific elements like:
- The amount and type of work involved and skills required to pursue your business goals
- Your company’s current workers and the skills they have
- What skills you’ve filled and what skills still need to be filled
- The number of workers you’ll need in the future
- What skills you have an overabundance of
Staffing plans help you fill in your skills gaps and keep your company productive and profitable. They can also help you save money by reducing the cost impact of worker turnover and burnout.
Having staffing plans can position your business to address difficult financial choices. These plans help illustrate the parts of your business where you need to spend money and the parts where you’re spending too much money.
The hiring plan is a subset of the staffing plan, with hiring involving bringing new staff members on. It’s just one component of the staffing plan. Meanwhile, the staffing plan assesses the overall skills needed and looks at the various ways of filling those needs (including retraining, contracting consultants, and investing in technology).
Workforce planning, on the other hand, is a strategic, long-term look at staffing planning.
Many companies are seeing the benefits of outsourcing to have independent professionals do some work related to their business processes. Upwork’s Talent Scout service can help you recruit quality freelancers to fill skills gaps in your workforce.
When do you use staffing plans?
Generally, companies create staffing plans to evaluate their human resources at the start of a budgeting cycle, when defining plans for specific projects, or whenever something happens that significantly impacts workforce needs.
By creating a staffing plan, the HR and leadership team designs a chart of all the skills and workers a company needs to complete its goals and objectives. Staffing plans can help a company decide how to budget and plan for the period ahead.
For instance, let’s say your company’s goal is to open a new location in another area in six months. You might create a staffing plan to accommodate all the workers your new location will need. You’d also outline what skills each worker requires and when you would need to hire, train, or otherwise have personnel ready to work.
Another function of a staffing plan can be to manage expenses related to labor. Having a staffing plan can help minimize overtime, reduce overhead, and align labor costs with variable operations. Better matching between needs and availability may reduce employee burnout and attrition rates, along with associated rehiring and retraining costs.
A staffing plan can help you identify specific skill gaps within your company. You might find that new products, new markets, new technologies, or other changes in your forecast business plans require additional resources or different types of talent. Alternative staffing solutions like Upwork make it easy to fill gaps quickly and effectively.
Example: How to create a staffing plan
In the next few sections, we’ll go over steps to create your staffing plan.
1. Outline your company goals
To make a staffing plan that helps your company meet its objectives, you have to know where the company is headed. Examine your business goals before working on a staffing plan.
Your business objectives can help you determine the number and types of workers you’ll need to get to your target. For example, if one of your goals is to increase your company sales by 20%, your staffing plan would likely consider how many salespeople you’d need to hire and train to meet your target.
2. Analyze current staffing
You can’t know how you need to alter your staffing situation unless you know the demographics of the staff you already have. Create an accurate account of all the workers you have available and their skills.
Reviewing staff performance data will help you prepare for future events. For example, low performers are more likely to quit and cost your company money in turnover. On the other hand, high performers can potentially be promoted to leadership positions when senior members retire.
Some components to include in the analysis:
- How many workers you have
- What your workers do
- What skills team members have
- Which workers are top performers and which are low performers
- The age of your workers
Gathering worker data might be as easy as printing out a report from your company personnel database. If you don’t have a company-wide database, you may have to reach out to different departments within your business to find this information.
3. Determine optimal staffing
Now that you have an account of your current staff, you’ll decide what changes need to be made to achieve your business goals. Both internal and external details can affect your staffing needs. Some things to take into account include:
- Projected turnover rate
- New service or product offerings
- Competitors’ ability to draw talent
- Mergers and acquisitions
- Upcoming technology and other company investments
- Labor costs in your industry
- Events that could impact the economy
- Unemployment rate
Several approaches can help you make informed predictions about your future staffing needs.
Use trend analyses
Use your company’s historical data to forecast its future. Collect worker data from the last five to 10 years. For example:
- Turnover rates
- Retirement and hiring trends
- Promotions
- Transfers
- Worker skills
- Worker job history
- Worker education
- How long workers have been at the company
Examining this data will help you find trends to determine your needs. For example, if you find that your company has had a turnover rate of 10% over the last five years, you might need to create an onboarding strategy that brings in new team members often enough to offset this attrition.
Trend analyses work best for companies that have been around for a long time. You might not have enough historical data to perform an effective trend analysis if your company is relatively new.
Utilize ratio analyses
To use ratio analysis, you’ll need to compare two business factors to find the ratio between them. Consider a simple example to illustrate the process.
You own an e-commerce store that sells women’s shoes. Currently, your factory has 100 workers who make an average of 1,000 pairs of shoes each day. That means the ratio between pairs of shoes and workers is 10:1 (1,000/100 = 10).
One of your business goals is to increase the average number of shoes your factory can make each day from 1,000 to 1,500. Because the ratio between shoes and workers is 10:1, you would need to hire 50 new workers to make the extra 500 shoes (500/10 = 50) if everything else stayed the same.
4. Conduct a gap analysis
Now that you’ve performed an extensive analysis of your present staffing situation and made predictions about your future staffing needs, you can use your reports to identify gaps in your workforce. What does your optimal staffing position have that your current staffing situation doesn’t?
Some questions you could ask when you compare the two are:
- What skills, if any, are missing from your current staff?
- Will there be enough workers to meet your business goals given retirement, turnover, and other factors?
- Which key team members, like executives and managers, will you need to replace in the future? (succession planning)
- Which workers have skill sets that are redundant or unneeded?
- When will you need to fill gaps?
Performing a gap analysis can help you determine how many new workers you’ll need and which abilities your company is missing so you can create a hiring matrix or skills chart for interviewing applicants.
Staffing plan templates
Let’s start with a staffing plan template for Excel or Google Sheets. Here’s a breakdown of how you could fill out the form.
- Position: What job or position needs to be filled?
- Source: How will you be filling the position? Will you be using an online job site, promoting from within, or recruiting from outside the company?
- Budget: How much can you spend on hiring for this position?
- Number of hires: How many people do you need to hire for this role?
- Approval: Do you have the approval to staff this position from decision-makers in your company?
- When needed: When will you need to hire for this position—right away or some time in the future?
- Status: Where are you in the hiring process for this position?
- Skills gap: What skills gap does this position fill?
- Start and end dates: If the job is temporary, when does it begin and when does it end?
- Notes: Add any special information about this position.
We provide another spreadsheet template that works a little differently. This template features a breakdown of job departments within a company with a projection of needs by quarter for three years.
In each box, type in the number of workers from each department you expect to need to replace or increase in that quarter.
Independent talent can help fill in any skills gaps
You need to have the right staff in place to give your business the best potential to grow. A quality staffing plan can help you plan for the future and ensure your company has team members with all the skills you need to meet your business goals.
