Staffing is the process of acquiring, deploying, and retaining a workforce of sufficient quantity and quality to create positive impacts on the organization’s effectiveness. Strategy outlines how management plans to achieve its objectives.
Before you begin hiring a support staff, it is important to ensure that you have developed a staffing strategy that will help your business work most efficiently. While many businesses don’t have an official document detailing their staffing strategy, you may want to at least ponder various components of such plan that will enable you to make the right staffing decisions to better align with your business objectives:
- Overview: How does your business work in the current economy and what are some of the general industry trends you have witnessed.
- Alignment to organizational goals and strategies: What is the big picture of your business? What would you like to accomplish and how might the right staffing get you there. How have you defined your offerings and consideration of those boundaries, would it make sense to outsource a particular task rather than hire someone else to manage it?
- Filling openings: As your business grows and expands you will need to determine which tasks you want a new hire to do. Consider writing job descriptions in order to solidify what you are looking for in candidates that will manage these specific tasks – including education, experience and temperament.
- Diversity goals: What is your business’s stance on diversity? How important is it for to ensure diversity in terms of gender, race and culture? That will influence your strategy and the manner in which you attract applicants
- Retention: Before you even hire anyone, you should consider measures you will use to ensure employee retention. While not all businesses can offer competitive health care packages, you might consider other incentives that would attract qualifies applicants: flexible hours, paid time off, promotional and training opportunities.
- Employee development: Do you plan on training employees once they are hired or do you expect them to come equipped with a specific skill set and background? Consider ways you might promote professional development within the staff. This might include onsite or offsite training opportunities that would enhance their resume and create well – rounded and better skilled employees
- Work environment: Are there any policies that you will like to define concerning the work environment? For example; do you want to detail your business stance on discrimination or the professionalism expectations from your employees? Would you like to develop some offices rule that could be made public to your staff?
It is important that you hire employees strategically, enabling your business to accomplish its objectives and function optimally. And in the end, your profit grows while your company future seems sustainable.
Thank you.
By Femi Adigun
COO/Team Leader
ClearEdge Professional Services Limited
Ampak Plaza, Plot 3 Otunba Jobi Fele Way
Central Business District, Alausa, P.O. Box 12594 Ikeja
Lagos. Cell: 234-8033462408, (0)8099925302
