A staffing model is a framework for how your business hires, scales, and manages its workforce based on demand.
Traditional types of staffing services fall short in dynamic environments like warehouses, events, or fulfillment centers. Traditional temp agencies near you often don’t have the flexibility to scale the workforce to match a comprehensive staffing model.
There are 5 steps to writing a staffing model: define your goals, forecast demand, break down needs, choose the right mix, prioritize flexibility, and monitor.
Step 1: Define Your Business Objectives
Start with the big picture, look at your business and define your goals.
Some common goals are:
Trying to reduce labor costs
Increase Flexibility
Improve fill rate and performance
Set operational goals that will set your business ahead of competition. Your staffing model should align with your operational goals.
For example if a warehouse has struggled in the past to remain efficient and fast during the busy season, then their goal could be to improve efficiency and speed during peak demand.
Step 2: Forecast Demand
Use past data to estimate future workload. This might look different for different industries.
For warehouses this could include weekly order volume, shipping schedules or busy seasons of demand. For events and catering businesses this would include the number of planned events and peak seasons.
Tools like spreadsheets, your POS system, or warehouse management software can help you forecast accurately.
For example, a warehouse could notice an increase of orders in the first few days of the week. The warehouse could forecast that they need 15 more packers for the first few days of the week.
Step 3: Break Down Labor Needs
Determine what labor is going to be needed. First determine the time period, is it monthly, weekly, or daily.
Then determine the type of roles needed. For example, pickers, loaders, servers, forklift drivers, or bartenders.
Then determine how many workers you need. For each time period and each role consider how many workers it takes to get a job done. From this estimate shift hours and the number of shifts needed.
Pro Tip: Create a table by role, shift, and total headcount needed.
Step 4: Choose the Right Staffing Mix
Choosing the right mix of full time labor and temp workers near you gives any business a competitive advantage.
Full-time employees are the foundation of the staffing model. These employees should make up the leadership roles and can handle the base load. Depending on industry and business size there may be very few to a lot of full time workers.
Temp workers have the ability to flex to variable demand. There workers can handle the general labor staffing while still being flexible to work based on demand.
A powerful tool most labor agencies near you can’t provide that online staffing platforms can is the ability to build a bench of flex workers. With a bench of workers who have already worked shifts and who the business can trust, managers don’t have to worry about finding temp staff for their business. They simply send out an invite through the staffing platform to the workers they want to work.
In the warehouse example this warehouse would determine how many workers they need for consistent packers. Then they would use warehouse temp staffing to fill in on the days when orders are higher.
Step 5: Build in Flexibility
Flexibility is the most key part for building a staffing model. Having flexibility built into the plan allows businesses to adjust the staffing model to real time demand and to be more efficient. The ability to scale up or down quickly based on demand gives a huge competitive advantage.
The best way to build in flexibility and find temporary labor near you is through staffing platforms. Staffing apps like Bacon, have systems to track worker performance, build a bench of trusted workers, rate workers, adjust shifts on a shift by shift basis and invite workers back to future shifts.
The warehouse looking for more warehouse packers could post the shifts they need at the beginning of the week on Bacon and find temp employees just for the shifts they need them.
Step 6: Monitor and Adjust
After the staffing plan is set up, monitor and adjust. Track cost-per-hour and output. Review how often you’re over or understaffed. Optimize shift lengths or worker types as needed.
A good staffing model isn’t static, it's updated regularly based on business needs.
A solid staffing plan is built from 6 steps: defining goals, forecasting demand, breaking down labor needs, choosing the right staffing mix, built in flexibility, and monitoring and adjusting. By building a staffing model that is unique to your business you can increase efficiency and cost effectiveness.
Staffing apps, like Bacon are the best way to find temp staffing while keeping the flexibility your business needs.
