Both staffing and scheduling refer to assigning work to people – however, these are two distinct processes, each focused on different aspects of your business. They are equally important and complement each other, and they both strongly affect the workflow and team performance.
So let’s clarify the difference between these two processes and explore how you can optimize them for your business' success.
What is staffing?
Staffing is the process of assigning personnel to jobs. Here the focus is on “who” is doing what. For staffing to be effective, it’s important to assign the right personnel to the right tasks.
In other words, positions in an organization need to be filled with qualified personnel – people with the necessary skills, abilities, and experience.
Key elements of staffing
Staffing process involves several key elements:
- Identifying the business goal: Business goals determine what positions you will need to create and fill, and what skills those positions will require - which helps you build your staffing model.
- For example, if you’d like to improve customer satisfaction, you’d need to hire a customer service representative (or create a whole department).
- Identifying the type of position: A position can be of two types – permanent and temporary. Management may hire an employee for either an indefinite time period or temporarily, depending on the business need.
- Creating an accurate job description: A job description helps set expectations for an employee, clarifying the duties and responsibilities and listing required skills and qualifications.
- Recruitment: This is the process of finding the right candidates and encouraging them to apply for jobs in your company.
- Providing training: Training and onboarding is necessary for new employees – however, it’s also useful for those who already work at the company, as it provides them with opportunities for professional development.
- Transferring and promotion: Transferring refers to moving an employee from one role to another without an increase in pay, status, and responsibilities. Promotion, in contrast, involves a change in payment and status.
- Forecasting staffing needs: This can be done by analyzing past data, like sales patterns. Forecasting will help you ensure you’re never short-staffed.
Read on: Workforce Forecasting: Strategies, Tools & Challenges ➡️
What is scheduling?
Staff scheduling is a process of assigning tasks and responsibilities to every team member. It focuses on when people are working rather than who is working. Schedules are built around the resources available – time and personnel.
An effective scheduling process balances employees' workloads, eliminating possibilities of under- or overallocation, which inevitably leads to a loss of employee productivity and high turnover, and ensuring a better work-life balance and job satisfaction.
Key elements of scheduling
Developing a schedule involves the following steps:
- Building Work Breakdown Structure (WBS): WBS is decomposition of a project into deliverables or phases. It makes business operations more manageable, visualizing all the steps that need to be taken.
- Identifying project scope: This involves determining project goals, deliverables, costs, and deadlines.
- Identifying activities and their duration: These are the actual actions that need to be done, either by a group of people or an individual. We can say that this phase means further deconstruction of the WBS, ensuring logical connections between elements.
- Determining resources: At this point, you analyze how many people you need to accomplish the tasks. You may wish to make a resource breakdown structure.
- Assigning resources: Here you define the amount of work for each employee. What’s important, you should never assume a resource is available 100% of the time – while this isn't a hard and fast rule, individual contributors usually 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.
- Updating a schedule: The scope of work might change, and resources might suddenly not be available, too, because of factors like illness or unexpected family issues. A schedule must be flexible and reflect all the changes.
What are the core differences between staffing and scheduling?
As you can see from the previous section, staffing and scheduling are not the same processes – while staffing is more about who is working, scheduling concerns the time when the work is happening.
To clarify the difference, let’s compare them through the following aspects:
Building a team vs. Organizing a team’s activities
The main difference between the two processes lies in their purpose. The purpose of staffing is to have the right number of qualified people on your team, available at any time (and to reach that purpose, a staffing plan can be of great use). The purpose of resource scheduling is to ensure the right people are being involved at the right time.
Wide context vs. Narrow context
Staffing relates to your business in general. Based on various factors such as economic situation, market trends, and customer preferences, your staffing needs will vary over time.
Scheduling, on the contrary, happens in a narrower, more immediate context. To make a schedule, you do not need to analyze the industry – you work with a specific situation, assigning the right people to the right tasks that have to be completed within a certain time period.
Long-term focus vs. Short-term focus
Staffing is a long-term process. Staffing aims to an organization with skilled employees who would work for it over some time (if it’s not a temporary position a company needs, of course.) Besides, staffing is time-consuming: it takes time to recruit, hire, and onboard new people.
Scheduling doesn’t take that long – when making a schedule, you focus on shifts, days, weeks, or months. Your object of interest is not the company as it is, but the project you’re working on right now.
How staffing and scheduling can support each other
Both staffing and scheduling are about human resources, and these two processes go hand in hand.
For an organization to function properly, you need to have trained people who are capable of doing the tasks at hand (staffing) – however, just having them is not enough, you also need to make sure they’re available when you need them (scheduling).
Quite often, projects fail not because there aren’t skilled people in a company, but because the skilled people were not properly scheduled. To fill a gap, you can always hire a new employee or provide training (and that would be a staffing solution,) but that would be costly and wouldn’t make much sense as you already have a skilled person on the team.
What you need is a scheduling solution – planning before the project starts and deciding who works when.
At the same time, workforce scheduling alone cannot solve all the problems. If you do not have the right skill to complete a task, the quality will suffer, or the task will not be completed at all.
To cut a long story short, staffing and scheduling complement each other. A good workforce strategy, combined with resource scheduling, can help reduce labor costs and improve the work environment.
How to improve staffing:
- Practice strategic staffing, aligning your workforce with your business strategy.
- Understand your ideal staffing levels (the number of people you need to achieve the most optimal performance.)
- Hire a staff manager, who would be responsible for administrative staff duties.
- Make sure you build a diverse talent pool: The more people with diverse skill sets and abilities you can select from, the better. By hiring employees with different experiences, you get ready for potential situations when unexpected gaps will need to be filled. Besides, a diverse team is more likely to generate interesting ideas!
- Cross-train: Even though we are all naturally better at some things rather than others, we can still be trained to do something new. This provides a professional development opportunity for an employee and helps managers deal with situations when they need to create a new position or replace someone, temporarily or permanently.
How to improve scheduling:
- Get to know your team: To schedule effectively, you need to actually know who can do what. Firstly, it’s just logical to assign people to the tasks they can do. This way, they will work productively and feel the meaning behind their work, which is crucial for motivation, employee satisfaction, and well-being. Secondly, you can pair or group employees with the right knowledge and temperament, making sure they will support each other.
- Use scheduling software: Various employee scheduling tools will let you gain visibility and systematize all the resources you’ve got. For example, in Runn, you can plan and track your projects, create a resource pool, customize each employee’s availability by work days and hours, and even catalog skill sets. This helps balance employees’ workloads, making sure tasks are assigned fairly without overburdening particular employees and ignoring the others.
🚁 Get a helicopter view of who's doing what. Runn brings visibility to your team's schedule, helping you find the sweet spot between "time out" and "burnout". Try for free today.
- Be ready for emergencies: Having a plan B will help you make sure that deadlines will be met no matter what. You could build a pool of on-call team members who can replace their colleagues. Or like we mentioned, just do not assign employees to work at full capacity, so they will still have some time to do a little more work.
- Regularly review the schedule: Update it every time changes happen, so the schedule reflects the current state.
Final thoughts
Staffing and scheduling are an inherent part of project planning, and the more thought you put into them, the better result you will eventually achieve. After all, it's people who determine how other resources will be utilized. So make sure you choose the right people – and that they work at the right time.
