All businesses are dynamic in their own way and some have greater needs to absorb changes in operational requirements. We are coming up on a new year which makes it a great time to review your 2020 staffing needs. If you are staying on top of things, then you will know what to expect for the next full year. Hopefully you will retain existing business levels and bring on new challenges and responsibilities. The last thing you need is to get caught flat-footed with insufficient staffing. It’s not just a lack of manpower; you will not have the critical skills your business needs to progress.
Tracking Known and New Variables
Analyzing your workforce needs means discovery, planning, and knowing what will change as much as possible. You have historically known changes such as retiring employees and statistically known attrition rates over a 12-month period. If you have not been tracking and organizing staffing trends, then you should implement a program to do it soon. Doing so will make your business more efficient and better prepared for staffing forecasts.
If you are planning to use new technology and systems in 2020, are you aware of how that may impact existing employee levels? There are many ways in which new technology and processes impact use of human resources. In some cases, certain positions may become obsolete or amended in some way. You may find that training existing employees for new roles is necessary. Another option is using their skills in another capacity within your organization. Current employees are trained to work in your company, and valuable employees are an asset in many ways. What will you do to retain them?
Skills Your Business Needs – Short and Long Term Goals
Companies with dynamic and changing needs should have a process for identifying skills needed to achieve business objectives. You can further break this down to short term, intermediate and long term business goals. For now, are you aware of the skills needed to accomplish 2020 goals?
That question has to be carefully examined in the situation of introducing new systems in common business departments such as IT or manufacturing. Other good examples are adding technology upgrades in data management, records, and other information intensive processes. The point here is you need people with the needed skills to operate and maintain these workflows. If your business requires skilled personnel in new areas, then you have to train existing employees, hire new employees, or outsource these skill sets.
Human Resources and Departmental Cooperation
Usually the tasks for determining staffing needs falls under the domain of Human Resources. A capable HR department will know how to identify staffing needs in all time frames. However, all operational department managers need to be involved because they are closest to where the work is done. Each department will have more detailed understanding and their fingers are on the pulse of their respective organizations.
How accurate your knowledge is for future staffing needs in 2020 depends on many factors. Ultimately it comes down to taking advantage of methods for extracting useful data from existing information. That plus asking the right and most important questions will help yield the best answers.
If you need help defining your requirements or deciding if they should be contingent or permanent, give Flexicrew a jingle 423.648.1130 to support your analysis and projections.