What is a staff plan?

A staff plan is the strategic planning process that a company uses to identify its personnel needs. Also known as a staffing plan, this process helps employers understand the number and types of employees they need to reach organizational goals. It also defines what skills those employees should have. All staffing plans are similar, but they’re customized for each company. Even if you start with a staffing plan example as your guide, the details will relate specifically to your company’s activities and requirements.

Benefits of creating a staffing plan

A staffing management plan encourages you to analyze, examine and plan a strategy to help your company achieve its goals. That type of planning can prepare your company for upcoming organizational changes in many ways. Here are some benefits of developing a strategic staffing plan template for your company:

• Targeted recruitment efforts: You can align your recruitment efforts to attract the right employees to fit your company’s needs. You’re more likely to find a candidate with the necessary skills if you’ve already researched what you need.
• Staff retention: Staffing plans also help with retention. They allow you to evaluate training and development ideas to help your team members achieve the necessary skills and growth requirements. You’re also more likely to put employees in positions where they can thrive and use their skills well, which makes them want to stay.
• Succession planning: Forecasting changes and staffing updates can support your succession planning. It gives you a method of identifying prime candidates to move into leadership positions as others leave or you need additional managers.
• Productivity: When you anticipate changes in the workforce, you’re prepared for hiring and can minimize downtime. It allows you to get someone new into the position quickly to keep workplace productivity high. If you’re blindsided by the need for a new employee, you might not get that person hired quickly, which can slow productivity.

What to include in a staff plan

While your plan might be different from someone else’s staff planning template, it should contain some crucial information. Your staff plan may include many components, such as:

• Outline of personnel needed
• Job titles and job descriptions
• Time and location that personnel are needed
• Estimated number of on-demand employees for busy times of year
• Budgetary considerations
• Recommendation for corporate training
• Succession policies

How to create a staff plan

Here are the basic steps to take to create a staffing plan that aligns with your organizational objectives:

1. Identify your business goals

Identifying your business goals helps you anticipate staffing changes. They’re usually outlined in a strategic business plan. Use this plan to clarify your company’s objectives and evaluate how that might affect your workforce demands, including the need for more employees or new skills required to help reach those business goals.

For example, suppose you want to expand your mowing company into a full-service landscaping, pool care and snow removal company. In that case, you’ll need additional employees to perform the work, many of whom might only be seasonal employees.

You’ll also need experts in those areas to establish your processes. You might need a landscape architect or landscape designer, for example. Your marketing department might need additional help to promote the new services, and your customer service department might need to expand to schedule services and field customer calls.

2. Identify influencers

Determine whether there are factors that could impact your staffing plan. These factors could be internal, external, positive or negative and include anything that could affect the plan that the company has little control over.

To identify these potential influences, you should work with your team to brainstorm anything that could impact your workforce. Your list could include influences, such as low unemployment or a competitor that’s substantially increasing its workforce. Once your list is complete, group similar influencers. Those two examples, for instance, could be categorized as external workforce availability.

3. Understand your current staffing environment

To develop an effective staffing plan, you first must understand your current staffing environment. Your HR software can be an easy way to get the information you need. You can also use employee surveys to get additional information, such as skills or experience you didn’t know your employees had. Collect data related to:

• The number of employees
• Team sizes and who works where
• Skills and competencies
• Turnover rates
• Potential leaders and high-performing employees
• Low performers
• Staff age

This information could affect workforce demands. For example, if you have a large number of employees who are nearing retirement age, you could soon face a large turnover and need to hire several employees. Analyzing current skills and competencies among your staff helps you determine whether you already have the things you need or if you should focus future employee searches on candidates who have the missing skills.

4. Forecast future personnel needs

After evaluating your current staffing environment, you can make predictions about your future staffing needs. Factors and issues, such as business mergers, product launches, unemployment rates and economic changes, can all affect your staffing environment and should be taken into consideration. While forecasting involves some intuition, you can also use the following methods:

• Trend analysis: With this method, you gather historical data from the past 5 to 10 years, collecting metrics on hiring patterns, employee work experience and education, retention, turnover and demographics.
• Ratio analysis: Using this method, you calculate the ratio between business factors, such as future revenue predictions and personnel requirements.

5. Complete a gap analysis

Compare your current staffing environment with your future staffing predictions, looking at where your staff currently are and where they need to be. Pay attention to whether there are skills your workforce will need to meet business goals or whether you need more employees to meet organizational goals. Gaps in your workforce could include a lack of expertise, not enough people or employees who aren’t currently in the right positions.

It’s important to view these gaps as opportunities to create an ideal state for achieving goals, rather than weaknesses. Some factors you should consider are:

• Whether you can support your company goals when you compare the end state to the current state
• Where you’ll need to adjust your current staffing
• Whether you have staff with the right expertise

6. Create your staffing plan

With your analysis complete, you can now create a staff plan. It should include things like:

• Recommendations for a training program to teach current employees new skills
• Succession policies to streamline promotions or hand-offs after employees retire
• Future staffing needs, including when you need to hire them and where they’ll work
• The need for contingent or seasonal staff
• Whether you’ll need additional employees during certain times of the year to meet an increase in demand

All previous job titles, job descriptions and budgetary considerations should also be included in your staff plan.

Related: How to Find Good Employees

Frequently asked questions about staffing plans

What are the different types of staffing plans?

Staffing plans vary depending on the industry, size of the company and anticipated growth. Some of the most common types of staffing plans are:

• Short-term staffing: This type of staffing plan focuses on a company’s immediate needs.
• Long-term staffing: These are staffing plans that cover at least 1 year.
• Succession planning: This approach allows you to anticipate the departure of managers and train internal candidates to step into those roles.
• Strategic staffing: This approach involves a combination of short-term, long-term and succession planning.

What is a staffing analysis?

A staffing analysis is a process of identifying trends among your employees. Trends might include employee turnover, job satisfaction among employees, the staffing levels needed to manage a workload and the qualifications and experience of employees who are attracted to the company.

Who creates the staffing plan?

Staffing plans often focus on the HR department, but getting involvement from different departments can make the plan more effective. Current employees can give insight into staffing concerns and the support they need to improve their performance. Managers might have information about upcoming projects or staffing changes they anticipate on their teams.

How often should you update the plan?

How often you revisit and update your staffing plan depends on how quickly your company changes. Slow growth and relatively few changes mean your staffing plan should still be relevant. However, if you’re growing quickly, experiencing high turnover or dealing with major industry changes, reviewing your staff plan might be necessary. Once you have your initial plan in place, it’s easy to review each section and update the information based on any changes that occur.