If you want to hire the right people, boost employee engagement, and maximize productivity - start with an understanding of what staff planning is.
Having an in-depth grip on your organization’s skill pool is no easy feat. The company’s size, lack of inter-departmental alignment, and complexity of processes makes it hard.
But the benefits of knowing your workforce are countless.
It has the potential to improve almost everything — from boosting productivity, to elevating employee engagement levels.
So where exactly should you start? The short answer: with a strong understanding of what staff planning is. The long answer: this guide that takes you through not only why and when you need staff planning, but also shares examples and the challenges you’ll likely encounter along the way.
Dive right in:
Staff planning, also sometimes referred to as workforce planning, is understanding and managing an organization’s personnel requirements. This involves:
The aim is to make sure you aren’t under- or overstaffed, maximize employee satisfaction, and build or maintain the right skill set to achieve company goals.
Typically, companies undertake staff planning at the start of a new budget cycle or a new project. Its scope can be all-encompassing — covering staff from the full organization — or a specific team or department.
Regardless of when you go into personnel planning or what the scope is, it’s essential to understand that it’s not a one-and-done process. Instead, staff planning is related to proactively maintaining a living document specifying an organization’s current skillset and staff requirements.
From contributing to employee retention and cost savings to keeping your organization ahead of its game, staff planning yields several undeniable benefits. Here’s a quick rundown:
At the heart of any company’s success is its talent pool - the people who have the right skills to work toward set organizational goals.
To this end, a strategic staffing plan ensures you have the right talent pool to meet organizational needs, stay relevant in the market, and eventually enjoy a competitive edge.
An essential aspect of staff planning involves understanding the staff’s growth trajectory and the company’s succession planning.
At the end of the day, staff planning optimizes workload planning and employee growth trajectory. The result is increased employee motivation with optimal utilization and staff retention.
Staff planning helps organizations save money by reducing the cost of employee burnout. By ensuring staff members are professionally growing in their desired direction, workforce planning also contributes to improving employee retention.
To boot, staff planning makes sure organizations always have not just the right human resources but also the optimal number. This helps evenly distribute workload, preventing overwork and, in turn, growing employee satisfaction.
Finally, staff planning saves costs by improving productivity. This happens as employees are assigned work they’re most skilled at, which maximizes efficiency.
Staff planning breathes strategy into your recruitment efforts as it identifies the exact skills the company needs and by when.
This way, instead of hiring on a whim, you’ll be recruiting people with the necessary skills your organization needs.
Not to mention, knowing what talent a company needs and when prepares you for hiring at the right time — minimizing downtime.
Essentially, there’s a lot that goes into staff planning. However, it can all be boiled down to three main elements. Think of them as broad to-dos that you need to nail to maximize the benefits of staff planning:
Workforce analysis involves diagnosing your organization’s employee health.
It centers around analyzing and understanding the strengths and weaknesses of your employee workforce. In doing so, staff analysis helps you understand where an organization stands in its skillset and where it needs to improve (hire new people or upskill the current talent pool).
To get this element of staff planning right, you’ll need to curate and review both internal and external data. Use a data analysis method to sift through the information and identify patterns, gaps, and more.
This second element of staff planning also requires combing through data - albeit internal, historical data.
The aim? To identify workforce and seasonal demand key trends and patterns in your data. For example, you might notice more work demand at a specific time of the year. Similarly, you may notice higher staffing needs during those same peak season months.
By identifying trends here, you can forecast future staffing demand. In turn, this helps you proactively plan and meet organizational staffing needs.
Where the first element we talked about, workforce analysis, covers identifying an organization’s employee strengths and weaknesses, this element goes deeper into the individual level.
Meaning: skill assessment and development involves understanding each employee’s strengths and shortcomings. The idea here is to identify opportunities for improvement and use the information for their professional growth and organizational succession planning.
At the end of this assignment, you’ll leave knowing which employees need training in what, what their growth trajectory looks like in the organization, and how the organization can benefit from their strengths.
Note that skills assessment also helps with succession planning or identifying prime candidates to move into leadership roles as others step up, leave, or you need more managers.
The challenges you encounter will likely be unique to your situation.
For instance, if you’re doing staff planning for the first time, you’ll see a different set of challenges versus if this is your fourth round.
That said, most challenges fall under one of these — which is a good way to anticipate the struggles you’d likely come across and prepare to handle them accordingly:
A large and diverse employee base means understanding the skills and skill gaps your organization has is not going to be easy.
The challenge is only going to multiply if you’re an international company or a fast-growing organization.
Understanding, managing, and aligning staffing needs across teams, departments, and locations can be complex.
You’ll want to determine unified goals and identify communication channels and communication frequency. You’ll also want to make sure all departments follow the same or similar approach to workforce analysis (gathering and analyzing data).
Closely related to the challenge above is this one — the lack of repeatable processes that you can scale to handle a large workforce efficiently.
It takes creating and reiterating your workforce analysis and planning processes, and then using them at scale. The problem, however, lies in aligning stakeholders and getting their approvals, which can slow the process significantly.
In fact, reiterating or testing what works and what doesn’t often gets hard in large organizations for this very reason.
In trying to get approval from and align leadership, staff planning can quickly become company-centered. This brings its own set of obstacles:
What’s more, taking this approach also often dilutes your analyses. For instance, you can’t accurately assess staff skills, motivations, and career paths. As a result, you work more on assumptions than data (including one-on-one employee feedback).
The solution? You need a bottom-up approach to learn staff member’s goals, strengths, and shortcomings. Then review your findings in light of the company’s objectives and determine how both ends can support each other’s growth.
Not only does this approach improve staff planning but also helps move the change management needle and create an engaged workforce.
Lastly, even as you get past the workforce analysis, skills assessment, and demand and supply forecast homework, you’ll come face to face with yet another challenge: change management.
Resistance to change can come from anywhere, be it staff or specific members of stakeholders. In either case, you’ll want to learn what lies at the root of the resistance.
And throughout, make the change about the team, person, or department you’re talking to — not the organization.
For example, outline how staff members would benefit from workforce planning (say, more opportunities for growth or fewer overworked hours, depending on what employees are actually struggling with or desire).
Here’s a complete 11-step guide to creating a successful change management process ➡️
Before we wrap this up, here are some more resources to help you efficiently plan your organizational personnel:
Quick reads for clarity on business objectives:
Techniques to tap into:
Step-by-step guides to nail essentials:
Staff planning tools:
