What’s the difference between staffing and planning?

Staffing and planning both refer to assigning work to people – however, they are two distinct processes, each focusing on different aspects of your business. They are equally important and complement each other, and they both strongly affect workflow and team performance.

So let’s clarify the difference between these two processes and explore how you can optimize them for your company’s success.

What is staffing?

Staffing is the process of assigning personnel to positions. The focus here is on “who” does what. For staffing to be effective, it’s important to assign the right people to the right tasks.

In other words, positions in an organization must be filled by qualified personnel – people with the necessary skills, abilities and experience.

Key elements of staffing

The staffing process involves several key elements:

1. Identifying the business objective: Business objectives determine which positions you’ll need to create and fill, and what skills these positions will require. For example, if you want to improve customer satisfaction, you’ll need to hire a customer service representative (or create an entire department).
2. Identifying the type of position: A position can be of two types – permanent or temporary. Management may hire an employee for an indefinite or temporary period, depending on the company’s needs.
3. Creating a precise job description: A job description helps define expectations for an employee, clarifying duties and responsibilities and listing the skills and qualifications required.
4. Recruitment: This is the process of finding the right candidates and encouraging them to apply for jobs with your company.
5. Training: Training and induction is necessary for new employees – but it’s also useful for those already working in the company, as it provides them with opportunities for professional development.
6. Transfer and promotion: Transfer refers to the movement of an employee from one role to another without any increase in salary, status or responsibilities. Promotion, on the other hand, involves a change in pay and status.
7. Forecasting staffing needs: This can be done by analyzing past data, such as sales patterns. Forecasting will help ensure that you are never understaffed.

What is planning?

Personnel planning is the process of assigning tasks and responsibilities to each team member. It focuses on when people work, rather than who works. Schedules are built around available resources – time and personnel.

An effective planning process balances employee workloads, eliminating the possibility of under- or over-allocation, which inevitably leads to lost employee productivity and high turnover, and ensures a better work-life balance and job satisfaction.

Key planning elements

Developing a schedule involves the following steps:

1. Identify project scope: This involves determining project objectives, deliverables, costs and deadlines.
2. Breakdown ofa project into deliverables or phases. This makes business operations more manageable, visualizing all the steps that need to be taken.
3. Identification of activities and their duration: These are the actual actions to be performed, either by a group of people or by an individual. We could say that this phase means a further deconstruction of the WBS, guaranteeing logical connections between the elements.
4. Determining resources: At this stage, you analyze how many people you need to get the job done. You may wish to create a resource allocation structure.
5. Resource allocation: Here you define the amount of work for each employee. Importantly, you should never assume that a resource is available 100% of the time – although this is not a hard and fast rule, individual contributors typically spend 85% of their time on productive work that advances project progress, while the rest is spent on meetings and administrative tasks. For managers, this proportion is likely to be even higher.
6. Updating a schedule: The scope of work may change, and resources may suddenly no longer be available, due to factors such as illness or unexpected family problems. A schedule needs to be flexible and reflect any changes.

What are the main differences between staffing and planning?

As you can see from the previous section, staffing and planning are not the same process – while staffing is more about who works, planning is about when the work takes place.

To clarify the difference, let’s compare them through the following aspects:

Building a team vs. organizing team activities

The main difference between the two processes lies in their objective. The objective of staffing is to have the right number of qualified people on your team, available at all times. The objective of resource planning is to ensure that the right people are involved at the right time.

Broad vs. narrow context

Staffing is about your business in general. Based on various factors such as the economic situation, market trends and customer preferences, your staffing needs will vary over time.

Planning, on the other hand, takes place in a narrower, more immediate context. To plan, you don’t need to analyze the industry – you work with a specific situation, assigning the right people to the right tasks that need to be accomplished within a certain period of time.

Long-term focus vs. short-term focus

Staffing is a long-term process. Staffing aims to equip an organization with qualified employees who would work there for a certain period of time (if not a temporary position that a company needs, of course). What’s more, staffing takes time: it takes time to recruit, hire and integrate new people.

Planning doesn’t take as long – when creating a schedule, you focus on projects, days, weeks or months. Your focus is not on the business as it is, but on the project you’re currently working on.

How can staffing and planning support each other?

Staffing and planning both involve human resources, and the two processes go hand in hand.

For an organization to function properly, you need to have trained people who are capable of carrying out the tasks at hand (staffing) – however, just having them isn’t enough, you also need to make sure they’re available when you need them (planning).

Very often, projects fail not because there are no qualified people in a company, but because qualified people have not been properly planned. To fill a gap, you could always hire a new employee or provide training (and this would be a staffing solution), but this would be costly and wouldn’t make much sense since you already have a qualified person on the team.

What you need is a planning solution – planning before the project starts and deciding who works when.

At the same time, planning alone can’t solve all problems. If you don’t have the right skills to accomplish a task, quality will suffer, or the task won’t get done at all.

In short, staffing and planning complement each other. A good workforce strategy, combined with resource planning, can help reduce labor costs and improve the working environment.

How to improve staffing :

1. Practice strategic staffing: align your workforce with your business strategy. With Teambook, you can visualize your long-term skills needs and plan your recruitment accordingly.
2. Understand your ideal staffing levels: Determine the number of people you need to achieve optimum performance. Teambook enables you to analyze your resource utilization and identify staffing needs.
3. Build a diverse talent pool: The more people with diverse skills and abilities you have to choose from, the better. By hiring employees with different backgrounds, you prepare for potential situations where unexpected gaps will need to be filled.
4. Cross-training: Even if we’re all naturally better at some things than others, we can always be trained to do something new. This provides a professional development opportunity for an employee, and helps managers deal with situations where they need to create a new position or replace someone, temporarily or permanently.

How to improve planning :

1. Get to know your team: To plan effectively, you really need to know who can do what. First, it just makes sense to assign people to the tasks they can do.
   In this way, they will work productively and feel the meaning behind their work, which is crucial for motivation, employee satisfaction and well-being.
2. Use scheduling software: Various employee scheduling tools will help you gain visibility and systematize all the resources you have.
   For example, with Teambook, you can plan and track your projects, create a resource pool, customize each employee’s availability by working days and hours, and even catalog skills. This helps to balance employee workloads, ensuring that tasks are allocated fairly without overloading particular employees and ignoring others.
3. Be prepared for emergencies: Having a plan B will help ensure that deadlines are met whatever happens. You could set up a pool of on-call team members who can fill in for their colleagues. Or, as we mentioned, don’t assign employees to work at full capacity, so they still have time to do a little extra work.
4. Review the schedule regularly: Update it whenever changes occur, so that the schedule reflects the current state. Teambook’s real-time planning features enable you to adjust your resource allocations instantly.

Examples of use with Teambook

Example of staffing with Teambook :

A digital marketing agency uses Teambook to identify that it needs to strengthen its web development team for the next six months.

Thanks to Teambook’s skills dashboards, she can visualize skills gaps and plan the recruitment of a senior React developer and a junior UX designer.

Example of planning with Teambook :

The same agency then uses Teambook to plan its teams for three simultaneous customer projects. The visual schedule enables them to see at a glance that the senior developer is over-allocated next week, and to readjust by shifting certain tasks or involving the junior developer in tasks adapted to his level.

Conclusion

Staffing and planning are an inherent part of project planning, and the more you think about it, the better the result you’ll end up with. After all, it’s people who determine how other resources will be used. So make sure you choose the right people – and that they work at the right time.

With Teambook, you have an integrated platform that enables you to efficiently manage both your staffing needs and your planning challenges, ensuring that your projects are delivered on time with the right resources.

All that’s left is to test Teambook for free for 30 days, without a credit card!