A staff deployment plan differs in every organization depending on the requirement and other factors. Most managers use staffing deployment plans only to identify the headcount additions and reductions when much more can be achieved.
If you are creating a staff deployment plan, you should know what questions to ask to clearly understand the current state of the workforce, the desired future state, and how to get there. In this article, we’ll explore how managers can create a staff deployment plan best suited for your business’s particular needs.
Table of Contents
What is a staff deployment plan?
A staff deployment plan is a process that provides flexible multi-channel workforce forecasting. With effective staff deployment planning, companies can ensure that there is an accurate representation of work and employees and workload is evenly distributed and meets the budgetary goals.
A staff deployment plan is how you can decide the best possible employee schedule. It also fully leverages the employee skillsets to balance the workload and gives an optimized shift schedule by accounting for variables such as payroll requirements, employee availabilities, budgetary objectives, company requirements, and other policies.
With workforce deployment, an organization can align the company’s goals, customers’ expectations, and the employees’ career needs. A staff deployment plan transforms the scheduling process from a necessary, tedious, and clerical chore into a cost-effective, analytical, and proactive business management process.
Benefits of the employee deployment plan
While managers will need to spend significant time crafting a quality staff deployment plan, it is still worth the investment of resources. It is because the outcome offers many advantages. Here are the key benefits of an employee deployment plan:
1. It saves time
A deployment plan is not only for scheduling optimization but also provides employees with a clear description of what they need to do. It is also a great document to assist in onboarding new hires as they are less likely to commit mistakes at work. It saves time as managers and supervisors don’t have to spend time making corrections or altering the shift schedules.
Deployment plans are highly effective in ensuring that employees work on tasks correctly. HR managers are free from repeated tasks of adjusting shift schedules to ensure high productivity. They can invest the time saved in making crucial business operation decisions that directly contribute to revenues and profits.
2. No worry of shortage of employees or no employees for a particular task
When you utilize software solutions like Truein to keep track of the workers, you are in a better position to schedule shifts, distribute workload, and keep productivity high at all times. Understaffing or overstaffing are both problematic for a company. If you regularly struggle with a shortage of employees, not only will the production levels be hurt, but you will also face difficulties on other fronts.
Workers will be overworked if there is a shortage, and you might be forced to give tasks to employees who are not appropriately skilled to handle them. Staff deployment plans free you from such issues. You can forecast if there will be an increase in demand for labor or workers ahead.
3. Work gets completed on time
With the correct number of shift workers, you can ensure that the work is done on time. Staff deployment plans can inform about the gap in the skillset in the workforce such that you can train employees accordingly. Cross-training employees is an effective way to make sure you always have workers available to substitute for other workers.
How to create a staff deployment plan
1. Evaluate the staffing goals
Like any other planning task, the first step in developing a staff deployment plan is to evaluate the organization’s needs. You have to recognize the targets you want to achieve and write them down such that employees can work towards them. HR managers are responsible for evaluating the goals and identifying the support needed to meet those goals.
When you clearly understand the staff deployment plan requirements, you can better align departmental goals with the organization’s goals. For this step, you must reach other leaders to understand their expectations from the departments for the coming year or new strategic initiatives they plan to undertake that will require staffing adjustments.
Here are some critical questions that can help you identify significant goals:
- What primary strategic or tactical goals the company wants to implement for the upcoming year?
- How will HR managers support these goals?
- What goals do you need to set for your team such that your team is aligned with the company’s goal?
- What staffing changes will need to be worked on to ensure enough workforce to make these goals possible?
- How will you ensure that other departments support each other to achieve the end goals?
2. Assign roles to the employees
After you identify the goals correctly, the next step is to assign roles to the employees. First, evaluate the current staffing state and create an inventory of the skillset at play. The staff deployment plan must support future goals by availing the right talent at the right time.
To effectively assign roles to employees, you will need information like current staff, contingency workers, and other contractual staff available to fill in the gaps. In addition, you must know about their skillsets and the role they perform within the company. Manually it is impossible to keep track of all this information which is why you need automated tools like Truein.
Truein is a complete employee time and attendance system that offers shift scheduling solutions. It is a cloud-based, AI-powered face recognition attendance system that allows managers and supervisors to create and share shift schedules with workers. It will enable workers to record their attendance and confirm their availability for shift directly from the Truein app on their smartphones.
3. Provide training to employees for the work
If you find a skill gap after listing goals and matching them against the available workforce inventory, you need to plan ways to bridge the gap. Whether you find inadequate staffing, lack of expertise, or simply wrong employees being put in the wrong place, you can fix the issues by providing training to employees.
Analysis of the workforce will help you identify the deficiencies in the current state of employees. It is your responsibility as an HR manager to address the skill deficiencies that can hinder the success of the goals outlined in the staff deployment plan. Please do not view the skill gap as a weakness of the current teams but rather as an opportunity to help employees evolve in their roles to better align with future organizational goals.
4. Monitor performance
Once you have successfully decided the end goals of the staff deployment plan, created shift schedules, and matched workers with the right skills with the tasks, the last phase is to monitor the workers’ performance. Your staff deployment plan must monitor the end-state and interim staffing.
You must ensure that employees are not struggling with performance and can complete tasks on time. If there is a skill gap, consider retraining the employees whenever required. Any successful deployment plan must outline when the staff is needed, at what time, and location.
It should also differentiate full-time versus contractual staff and identify the critical roles based on the skill set.
Conclusion
A staff deployment plan is one of the essential components of workforce planning. It is the first step an organization can take towards evolving its existence and helping employees adapt to the changing needs of the business.
We hope this guide will provide you with enough insights to help you create an effective staff deployment plan that considers more than the headcount and includes additional complexities such as skill sets, end goals, and long-term strategic plans.
