47+ SAMPLE Staffing Plans

What Is a Staffing Plan?

A staffing plan is a strategic planning procedure that a company, namely its human resource department, undertakes to assess and identify the needs of its personnel and employees within the organization. The document aims to provide a better understanding of the number and the types of employees the organization requires to accomplish and achieve its organizational goals. Staffing plans identify the work that needs completion, the number of employees the company needs to accomplish work, skills, and experiences necessary to perform the task, and the skill gaps that need filling. Staffing plans also cover the entirety of an organization, from small teams to bigger departments and individual projects. A staffing plan also reduces labor costs while having maximum productivity, eliminates skill gaps through a gap analysis, increases employment opportunities and engagement, increases employee retention while reducing turnover rights, improves customer experiences, and streamlines business growth and development. A clear plan prevents probable problems that cause a delay in company growth and hinder the quality of work performances in producing services and products that result in unhappy customers and decrease business opportunities. Aside from recruiting, hiring, and training employees to give their best in their roles, staffing plans also help with budgeting and financial planning.

According to the American Staffing Association, job and career opportunities from staffing produced over 16 million employees before the pandemic and over 13.6 million during the pandemic. From the numbers, about 73 percent of staffing employees work full time.

Different Staffing Models in an Organization

In talking about functionality in the organization, staff and employees have to fulfill specific roles and responsibilities, making sure not to overlap with other personnel. Many companies strive for business continuity through satisfying the organizational needs and achieving their goal statement, mission statement, and vision statement. An organization implements different staffing models to cater to its needs. The section below talks about the different staffing models and additional information about them.

Full-time employees: Full-time employees are individuals that are exempt or non-exempt staff that are permanent and therefore managed, directly compensated, and retained by an organization. The staffing model has significant goals and objectives under the supervision of internal managers that evaluate performance. Companies utilize the aid of full-time employees to address indefinite needs with professional and experienced employees for hire. The risks of managing full-time employees lie in the continuous responsibility of providing training programs and educational seminars for professional certifications. In the case of newer full-time employees, they require motivators to satisfy expectations.Staff augmentation resources: In cases of staff augmentation resources, these are employees that are temporary members of the company with an assignment to existing functions of a particular department for a particular purpose for a specified period. The organization directly manages augmented individuals. Companies choose to add temporary employees when the current internal resources are dealing with more critical tasks and activities, or they are lacking the special skills and expertise to accomplish a project. Implementing staff augmentation is advantageous if the company has resilient employees and there is a need for rescaling to achieve company objectives.Professional services: Professional services are also known as consulting services. In this staffing model, organizations engage with third-party consultants when the business faces challenges that are unfamiliar to them without the necessary expertise or experience to find a solution. The staffing model deals with a consulting organization that deals with a particular problem while offering a solution. If a consulting agency works for an organization on a specific project, they are responsible for providing deliverables on a designated period while ensuring that the products and services are of quality according to the agreed-upon roles and responsibilities between the two entities. The consulting organization is a separate entity from the hiring company. They are self-managing and accountable for the actions that are in the statement of work. Outsourcing or managed services: Outsourcing resources is a practice by many businesses to free the organization from performing tasks, activities, or projects that align with its core values. The process of outsourcing resources for the continuity of business operations from third-party agencies frees an organization from worrying about the problem of recruiting, hiring, and retaining employees to perform vital and critical risk management functions. In outsourcing individuals, the hiring entity develops an approach with the advice and feedback from the outsourced employees, and it is also the responsibility of the hiring entity to measure the performance of the outsourced staff similar to regular and full-time employees. The outsourced individuals must also consider and deliver the work while practicing organizational culture and best practices. Aside from operating within the agreed-upon job order and work processes, the individuals can also respond to any disruptive event in an organization during their term. Many companies use outsourcing as a means to lower costs.Hybrid staffing model: In most cases, it is reasonable to use a hybrid staffing model for an organization. In a hybrid staffing model, the company initially works on a project by managing and directing professional services. Later on, professionals, through staff augmentation, come in to work together with the consulting services team during the project or work with onboarding employees towards the end of a consulting engagement. Finally, there is a process of turning over the activities to permanent and full-time internal employees.

How To Write a Staffing Plan for an Organization

Developing a staffing plan can easily be broken down into four steps. In these four steps, you need to have access to accurate information, up-to-date data, research analysis, and tools to carry out accurate staffing need assessment and analysis. The section below details the different steps you need to take to write a comprehensive staffing plan for your organization. A well-written staffing plan help calculate staffing needs with efficiency to help the future operations of the business.

  • 1. Set and Identify Business Goals and Objectives

    If there is no clear plan from the business regarding the vision or mission of the company and the direction it is taking, along with SMART goals, it becomes nearly impossible to guarantee that the company will have optimal staffing and the accurate employee development level to achieve success. It is necessary to work with all areas and departments of a business to develop a clear vision of how a product or service plans to improve lives in five to ten years. When setting goals, stick to using factual information backed by data. Decide on the factors or key performance indicators that you want to measure, then implement an HR analytics process using a software tool that saves time while providing accurate results.

  • 2. Determine and Analyze the Current Staffing Management Landscape

    After establishing a clear plan for staffing needs, it is necessary to understand the current staffing situation of the company. If the company has a setup of a robust human resources database that details all employee needs, this step is relatively easy to approach. However, if the company stores employee information in multiple locations, the first step to do is to consolidate necessary data into a single source. Work with different departments and managers to guarantee there is an accurate representation of information and complete the human resource database. After completion, you can start assessing the present staffing landscape and write an action plan from the data. Pay attention to essential information, including the total number of staff, staff distribution, employee skills and competencies, low performers, high performers, and age group and tenure. The set of data provides a deeper understanding of the employee landscape and accurately pinpoint staffing needs.

  • 3. Forecast the Optimal Staffing Levels in the Future

    Once there is a proper assessment of the current staffing environment, the next step is to make staffing predictions or projections for future staffing needs. In writing the staffing needs assessment, consider business goals, possible mergers and acquisitions, business investments, competitors attracting talents, unemployment rate, industry labor costs, economic changes, product launches, special events, and turnover rates. Internal and external factors can easily affect staffing decisions, and the company can make confident and educated guesswork by implementing a trends analysis or ratio analysis.

  • 4. Conduct a Gap Analysis

    With a solid understanding of present and future staffing needs backed by accurate data, you can compare the two reports and conduct a gap analysis. The analysis takes into account the supply of skills and their availability in the market, helping the organization to decide whether to recruit or upskill personnel to fill the gaps.

FAQs

What are the steps to create a staffing plan?

To make a distinct staffing plan for your company, start with identifying goals, compiling necessary job descriptions, analyzing and reorganizing staffing patterns, listing job requirements while focusing on performance, projecting staffing needs, and examining the workplace culture.

What are the components of strategic staffing?

Strategic staffing consists of workforce planning, sourcing, recruiting, selecting, acquiring, deploying, and retaining talent.

What is a staffing strategy?

Staffing strategy or strategic staffing is a business strategy utilized by the human resources department to guarantee a sufficient number of employees to meet current and future staffing needs to accomplish business goals.

Staffing plans are necessary tools to ensure that business operations continue in the present and future by allocating the right individuals and talent to perform specific tasks and activities. Staffing plans also incorporate possible recommendations to implement in the corporate training programs to propose solutions for skills gaps or develop succession policies to smoothly streamline the turnover of roles and responsibilities following retirements or promotions. Write a comprehensive staffing plan for your organization by downloading and selecting from 47+ SAMPLE Staffing Plans in PDF in the article above. Get yours today, only at Sample.net.