Most businesses with staff face at least some staffing problems, like not being able to find enough qualified people or dealing with excessive overtime. Fortunately, most of these problems are easy to solve once you identify and properly understand them.
The Problems With Staffing
These are some of the biggest problems with staffing that businesses face. These problems affect businesses of all sizes and in all industries, though some may be affected more than others by certain issues.
- Understaffing. We all intuitively know the main problem with understaffing: if you don’t have enough people to do the jobs you need to have done, the jobs won’t get done, or your employees will be compelled to take on more work than they reasonably should. The solution to this problem is to hire more people. This is a somewhat obvious solution, but it’s complicated by the fact that understaffing is sometimes hard to identify. How can you tell if your business is legitimately understaffed or if you’re just going through a busy period? How do you draw the line between challenging your employees and overworking them? Objective benchmarks and data can help you adequately answer these questions.
- Overstaffing. The flip side of understaffing is overstaffing, and it’s arguably a worse problem to have from a business perspective. Sure, you can hire twice as many people as you truly need to avoid the problem of overstaffing, but then you’ll have far more people on the payroll and not enough work to keep them busy. The best way to approach overstaffing is to prevent it proactively; only hire the people you need, as you need them, and you won’t have to worry about layoffs or painful restructuring.
- Overtime. If your employees are consistently working overtime, your business is going to have much less money and your workers are going to have lower morale. Fortunately, there are many strategies that can help you decrease overtime. Better labor tracking and productivity insights can help you identify the root causes of the overtime problem. From there, you can address the root cause. For example, it might be that you don’t have enough people on staff, or it might be that your employees are disproportionately motivated to pursue overtime for extra pay.
- Reactive hiring. When someone quits or leaves your workforce, do you immediately start searching for someone to replace them? This is a problem known as reactive hiring, and it can help perpetuate productivity and labor problems within your organization. It’s much better to take a breath, analyze the situation, and only move forward with hiring someone new when you’re confident you need one. In many cases, you can tolerate the loss or redistribute responsibilities in a more efficient way.
- Bad fit hiring. In a desperate effort to get more people in the door, many businesses suffer from bad fit hiring. They choose people who are under qualified, under motivated, or completely incompatible with the company culture. The easy solution to this is to take more time when making hiring decisions; instead of immediately pouncing on the first decent candidate you find, broaden your prospect pool and consider those candidates more carefully.
- Payroll problems. Delays or mistakes in payroll can take a toll on employee morale – and possibly cost your business directly. Incorporating a better payroll platform and introducing more checks and balances can resolve most issues here.
- Lack of flexibility. Businesses aren’t always predictable. Even if you have the perfect workforce for a given set of circumstances, that doesn’t mean the workforce is going to remain perfect in the future. Lack of flexibility can hurt you, so use cross training, contractor management, and other strategies to remain adaptable.
- Talent shortages. There’s currently a widespread talent shortage affecting dozens of different industries and millions of businesses all over the country. If a talent shortage affects an area of your business, it could mean depriving your business of necessary candidates, costing your business more money in recruiting, or both. There are several solutions to this problem, however, such as by training and educating people from within or seeking talent from less conventional places.
- Employee turnover. High employee turnover costs your business both time and money, so it should be avoided at all costs. High employee morale greatly reduces turnover, so use a combination of morale boosting strategies, like hosting parties and team building events, rewarding employees for hard work, and helping employees find a better work life balance.
- Objective data analytics. If you aren’t able to track or analyze objective data related to staffing, you may not even know that these problems exist. That’s why it’s important to have consistent, effective tracking software in place.
Three Big Keys to Success
At the highest level, there are three big keys to succeeding in preventing or addressing the biggest staffing problems that businesses face:
- Use the right tools. With better software platforms and tracking tools, your business will be much better positioned to identify problems and address them.
- Be proactive. Staffing problems are much easier to prevent than they are to address, so adopt a proactive mindset and work on problems early.
- Stay agile. Fostering and maintaining agility in your business allows you to quickly respond to almost any conceivable staffing issue.
Staffing is an issue in many businesses, but it certainly doesn’t have to be. There’s no way to avoid all the challenges associated with staffing, but there are ways to identify and navigate those challenges. If you’re adequately prepared, and you’re willing to invest and adapt, you should have no trouble building the efficient, capable workforce you need to thrive in your competitive environment.
