It's a difficult conversation - but it has to be had. Here's our advice on how to say "We are short-staffed" professionally.
Hands up who’s ever worked on a team that felt like it was constantly racing against the clock 👋
Globally, understaffing is a massive problem. A significant number of businesses are guilty of trying to muddle through with an excessively lean workforce.
According to a recent report by Indeed Flex, one in three businesses struggle with being short-staffed at least once a week. But by some estimates, the number might be even higher than that: a survey by CxOs reveals that 78% of businesses are understaffed, with half of them losing customers as a result.
With high demands and a limited workforce, work pressure is intensifying. It's crucial for department leaders to be able to communicate these staffing challenges effectively to senior management.
Here are some tips on how to approach this conversation and the key data points you should present to ensure leadership understands the severity of the situation and invests in a solution.
It all starts with how you set the tone and approach the conversation.
Terms like "short-staffed" can be provocative. They highlight a problem, and reveal that morale is suffering. But they don't necessarily prompt immediate action or thorough resource evaluation from leadership, unless they can be evidenced by data.
So, instead of saying, "we're short-staffed," explain why your team is struggling to meet the company's project demands. Show what your current resource pool looks like and what can realistically be achieved if the situation doesn’t improve.
Resource shortages hinder business growth, so it's important to articulate how these challenges will impact overall outcomes.
The business might want to launch ambitious projects. But it's crucial to emphasize that without adequate staffing these projects won't be completed on time, within budget, or up to the desired standard - all compelling reasons for leadership to take staffing issues seriously.
Remember the "iron triangle" of project management (also known as "the triple constraint"). You can't make changes to one point of the triangle and expect it not to impact the other points.
Inadequate staffing for a project means that you have to make trade-offs elsewhere. Either you have to reduce the scope of the project (meaning there's less overall work to be done), or you extend the project deadline (so that there's more time to fit the work in).
But if you don't do either of those things to compensate for inadequate staffing, you can expect the overall project quality to take a hit. Deliverables will be mediocre and rushed because the team was too small to complete all the work to a good standard in the time they were given.
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If these outcomes sound unpalatable to management, then they need to consider adding additional resources to the project.
One effective way to address these issues with leadership is through dedicated resourcing meetings.
In short, a resourcing meeting is a regular gathering for all relevant stakeholders to talk about immediate operational needs and long-term strategies for resource management.
They also create the opportunity to dedicate time to strategic tasks, like aligning your organizational objectives to resource management plans, and to bring attention to important data points - like utilization rates.
These data points are the key context that will illustrate the extent of your challenges with being short-staffed.
Being able to show overutilization is incredibly helpful when explaining why something is delayed or can't start yet. When we show our stakeholders how high overutilization is, they can empathize and understand the constraints we're facing. It facilitates conversations about priorities and timelines because they can clearly see that we’re at capacity. It gives us the ability to go back to other parts of the business and say, 'Look, these individuals really can’t take on any more work.'" - Cindy Tan, General Manager of IT Planning
Related: From Weeks to Two Days: How TPG Telecom Streamlined Their Capacity Planning with Runn ➡️
Overworking employees is a false economy. Overworked people are not more productive - in fact, they are more likely to make mistakes, as well as being more prone to developing physical or mental illness. However, despite this, overutilization remains a significant problem.
In fact, a recent report found that 71% of employees work overtime at least once a week. So, why does this issue persist?
In many cases, workloads are simply too high for what a person can realistically achieve within their working hours. This can be understood through the lens of work allocation and utilization rates.
If an employee is booked to 100% utilization, this means that every minute of their working day is accounted for. They are at 100% capacity - they can’t take on any more work, and if anything slips, it will have a knock-on effect for the rest of their schedule.
So, what happens when meetings overrun, or a task takes longer than planned because of some unanticipated complexity? Because there was no margin for error in their schedule, your team now has to make up the time by working longer hours than they are contracted for.
So, while 100% utilization might seem ideal, it's not sustainable.
Learn more: The Problem with 100% Capacity Utilization Rate ➡️
It's also essential to account for factors like holidays, sick leave, unplanned absences, and non-billable admin activities. All these factors impact your team's availability.
Ideally, you should aim for a maximum utilization rate of 80%, which provides a buffer that allows your team to perform at their best without burning out.
What if you don’t track utilization? Well, it’s harder to prove a staff shortage without the numbers to back it up. And I know - that doesn’t seem fair: you might be able to look around at your team and see that they are clearly feeling the pressure, working late, and feeling exhausted.
Unfortunately, though, senior management don’t have that same insight - and they don’t know your team like you do. Introducing a system for tracking utilization can help bridge that gap by giving you the solid numbers you need to prove your staffing challenges to the people who hold the purse strings.
Check out our guide: How to Introduce Time Tracking Without Alienating Your Employees ➡️
Not everybody likes the idea of time tracking - they think it’s too administrative, or like ‘big brother is watching’. But, to me, from a resource management perspective, if you don't see people's time, you're flying blind. It's as simple as that.” - Gary Ward, Director of Global Resource Staffing at Guidewire
Data visibility is key when seeking company-wide change and leadership buy-in. You need to present data - ideally, data that is visualized in a way that clearly illustrates your company's staffing levels and how they compare to project demands.
For example, with Runn’s People Planner and resource capacity feature, you create a bar chart that shows confirmed workload, tentative workload, effective capacity, contracted capacity, and requested time off—all layered to provide a clear picture of your resource capacity.
In the example below, you can see that the team is already overstretched by 31 hours, meaning they already have more workload planned than they could possibly deliver within working hours. This will result in either project delays, or people working overtime.
So, this is your signal that there is a resource shortage.
With tools like the People Planner, you can also show who is doing what, along with their utilization and capacity. This helps justify your resource management initiatives and requests for additional staff.
Simply stating that you're short-staffed often isn't enough to drive meaningful change, especially when that change needs to happen at the company level.
To address this issue, you must come to the table prepared - and that means being armed with relevant data that clearly shows how staffing shortages are impacting the business.
Approaching the conversation in this way, you will secure the necessary leadership buy-in and initiate the changes that will bring your staffing struggles to an end.
