Functional Department Staffing Levels

Any organization needs employees who can perform the required work to deliver the output required for the organization to justify its existence. This may be in the form of profits for commercial companies or service delivery for organizations that provides social services in one form or another.

Determining and maintaining optimal staffing levels is critical to the sustained competitiveness of any company. Employing more staff than necessary is clearly expensive. The cost is not only as a result of the increase costs in salaries, wages and the associated benefits. It also manifests as a hidden cost in second-rate performance by under-utilized employees that is not completely active or engaged in a useful activity. On the other hand, not having sufficient staff may result in lower production or excessive overtime, difficulty in ensuring support of critical positions during leaves as well as a dramatic increases in fatigue, absenteeism, and exhaustion suffered by employees.

The work than is required to be executed is normally structured based on the strategy of the company and reflected in the organizational structure of the company. Individual positions and their functions are defined in job descriptions to ensure that the work can be done in an effective, efficient and safe manner. This organizational structure together with the content of the job description normally provides the staffing needs of a company.

During the staffing process, these needs are converted to and expressed as selection criteria. The selection criteria should be aligned with the organization's strategic direction, as articulated in its mandate, values, strategic planning, human resource planning and operational planning. In addition, the selection criteria must assist the organization in meeting its corporate responsibilities with respect to re-employment, social responsibility and local employment requirements.

Organizational Structure

In general terms the organizational structure normally consists of operational departments and support functions. The support functions' structures are often required to provide support to a wide variety of operational units and departments.

The organizational structure can also reflect the organization's future need for specific skills and abilities in specific functions and at specific levels in the organization.

A model or practice that links an operational department's support requirements to the functional department's ability characteristics in a synergistic manner to achieve optimal productivity outcomes should be developed.

The selected synergy model should be adaptable to all areas of a company's practice including determining staffing criteria for direct or shared services. Many company executives only look at manpower numbers to determine staffing without factoring in the severity and complexity of the support needs of the operations. Support function staff is constantly required to justify additional staff to balance operational department's needs with existing competencies.

Operational department's support requirements include stability, complexity, vulnerability, resiliency and predictability; resources available; and the operational departments'' ability to operate with minimum levels of support. The functional department's ability or competencies are reflected in their ability to adequately respond to the operational department's unique requests, collaborate with colleagues, recognize holistic interrelationships, respond to diversity, show evidence of creative problem solving and demonstrate an ability to facilitate learning.

Staffing Model

Any staffing model should recognize that functional departments should be staffed with strategic and delivery level functions.

The model should be dynamic in that it allows for feedback from operational departments to impact on staffing levels. Static staffing levels may not adequately address the unique operational support requirements and needs but rather focuses on the technical and mechanical assistance requirements.

Some of the criteria that can be used include defining the manpower required to provide the support function in respect of the direct operational and day-to-day functions. The level of activity required from the support function to fulfill the support function will influence the number of staff required to provide the specific function. Another factor that will influence the staffing requirement is the management control and essential supervision requirements for the particular function.

The level and diversity of the technical or professional education or experience requirements will defiantly have a significant impact on the staffing requirements of the functional support department. The accountability in respect of the support provided by the functional department will be a further dimension that will impact on the staffing levels. The level of administrative support required to meet the assigned responsibilities will also impact on the number of employees required by the functional department.

In order to reduce, decrease or shrink the number of full time employees assigned to the support function and to still put these departments in a position to cope with flexibility in demand some effective strategies have been successfully implemented by various organizations and should be considered. These include placing personnel on temporary assignment in the affected department during times of high demand. Reassessing the mobility or deployment requirements for the delivery of the support could provide a venue for the reduction of functional support staff. The training and upgrading of basic skills of the operational staff to become self sufficient in certain support functions that is traditionally provided by the functional department may also go a long way in reducing low level support requirements.

Conclusion

Since many of the considerations which might prevent a functional department from providing a suitable and sufficient level of support to the operational departments may not be generally available, it is important to design the support function staffing in such a manner that allows for time based flexibility.

As time progress the service and support provided to the operational departments should be analyzed. Based on the outcome of the analysis adjustments should be made. The adjustment should be based on actual availability versus utilization rate of a particular resource or group of resources to reflect the nature of the inbound problem arrivals, and the service level ability with the existing staffing levels.

Clearly certain priorities have to be established in order to maximize support function efficiency. It would probably not be ideal to plan for 100% support efficiency. This implies that an objective system of prioritization would be required for determining the sequence of responding to requests for functional support with any given level of staffing in each functional department. This system of prioritization should be determined based on the organizational objectives and must be agreed with the operational departments at the higher level possible in the organization.