Time spent on Staff Planning and Employee Development payoffs with bottom line profits.  It lowers recruiting and hiring expenses, frees management time, creates advancement opportunities, leads to improved employee moral, all resulting in improved productivity, reduced operating expenses and an over all increase in net income.

But too often managers and HR departments are mired in the muck of daily operations to commit precious time to staff planning and development.  So when a hiring need arises, there is a mad scramble to fill the open position, ending with considerably greater costs to the organization in recruiting expenses, salary, benefits, and manager time, which otherwise could be avoided had proactive steps to staff planning and employee development been initiated.

Take for example the two scenarios:



Comparing the two scenarios its evident that Scenario A is considerably more costly in actual hard costs than Scenario B.



But in addition to the greater hard costs, Scenario A also has greater soft costs.  First, there is lost department productivity attributable to a) the department manager temporarily filling the vacant position, b) lost time for the temporary consultant to come up to operational speed, and c) lost time for the new employee to come up to operational speed.

And secondly, employee moral is lowered being sapped by a) increased pressure and temporary work loads and b) lack of perceived internal advancement potential.

While soft costs may not immediately be measurable in terms of actual lost profits, if not addressed over time will result in a downward spiral on over all employee moral, leading to increased resignations, added recruiting and hiring expenses, and depressed department productivity.

And admittedly, while the above paints a doom and gloom picture of a department circling the drain, the central point, that failure to focus on staff planning and development will cost businesses profits and reduced productivity remains valid.  And Scenario A is extrapolated across all departments, then a compounding effect of lost profits and productivity will be experienced, resulting in even greater losses.

Therefore, companies can increase profits and add to their bottom lines just by being proactive and undertaking three simple steps:

• Develop a comprehensive staffing matrix encompassing position roles, responsibilities, job requirements,


• Identify training needs of the existing staff to create skill set redundancy and position backup, and


• Create and implement annual employee performance plans incorporating skills training and knowledge development.

To learn more about staff matrix development and employee performance training plan development Contact US at Bassett bridge Associates TODAY!