Staffing and Scheduling: Differences Managers Need to Know

While staffing and scheduling may sound like the same thing, they’re actually two distinct processes that can have a huge impact on workflow, team performance, employee satisfaction, and the overall success of business operations.

In this article, we explore staffing and scheduling, discuss some of the main differences between them, and strategize on how to improve both. Once you optimize staffing and scheduling, all aspects of your business will run more smoothly, and your team members will be happier.

Key takeaways

Staffing is the strategic process of filling positions in an organization with qualified personnel.
Scheduling is the process of assigning shifts, tasks, and responsibilities to your team.
Staffing is long-term, data-driven, and has a wide focus, while scheduling is short-term, people-driven, and has a more narrow focus.
You can improve your staffing process by analyzing the current state of your business, building a staffing model, assembling a diverse team, cross-training your employees, and figuring out what you need to reach your goals.
You can improve your scheduling process by spending time with your staff, planning for both busy and slow times, building shifts around skilled employees, creating a “Plan B,” and using software to streamline the process.
Improving your staffing and scheduling processes helps you manage costs, improve your productivity, and keep staff.

Differences between staffing and scheduling
Where staffing and scheduling support each other
Restaurant staffing and scheduling example
How to improve staffing and scheduling
The impact of smart staffing and scheduling

Differences between staffing and scheduling

The differences between staffing and scheduling really start to stand out when you examine their definitions together.

Staffing: The strategic process of filling positions in an organization with qualified personnel (i.e., finding people with the right skills and experience and hiring them onto your team).

Finding the right people with the right skill sets is critical for an organization’s current and future needs. When an organization has a solid staff, it’s got a strong foundation for the rest of its business needs.

Staffing is the who. When you think about staffing, you need to consider:

Identifying your organization’s goals
Defining roles and responsibilities
Recruiting and onboarding
Transferring and promoting
Predicting future needs

Scheduling: The process of assigning shifts, tasks, and responsibilities to every member of your team so that your business runs smoothly and efficiently at all times.

Creating a daily, weekly, and monthly work schedule responsive to an organization’s demands and goals sets them up for success. And when a thoughtful plan is in place, real-time tweaks can be made to fine-tune it on any given day.

Scheduling is the when. When you think about scheduling you need to consider:

Outlining tasks and deliverables
Building work breakdown structure
Identifying activities
Determining staff configurations
Assigning hours to staff
Being nimble so you can adjust

With those definitions in mind, let’s examine a few more of the differences between staffing and scheduling, so you fully understand where they fit within your business model.

Long-term vs. short-term

Staffing: The staffing process is conducted with a long-term view in mind.

It can take a while (i.e., a month or longer) to recruit, interview, hire, and onboard the right people to fill openings within your business and support organizational growth.

Because of that, management and Human Resources are often looking well down the road, so to speak, in order to anticipate business needs and have skilled employees on payroll so that there are no gaps in coverage.

Scheduling: The scheduling process is conducted with a short-term view in mind.

Those responsible for assigning work hours often start by focusing on a single shift (of anywhere from two to twelve hours), a single day, or a single week. They address operational needs and resource allocation for their current organizational requirements.

Their primary concern is having enough team members with the right skills to fill all the tasks and responsibilities that are required to keep the business running smoothly.

Data-driven vs. people-driven

Woman working on staffing and scheduling

Staffing: The staffing process is data-driven. Analytics, data analysis, and long-term business goals determine what positions need filling. Drilling down even deeper, factors like revenue projections, market expansion, and competitive advantage are part of the process.

Yes, hiring a new addition to the team demands that you take into account skills and experience, but the system as a whole is more dependent on the data and analytics that let you know when it’s time to hire and when it’s time to allow attrition rates to rise.

Scheduling: The scheduling process is people-driven. Creating work schedules demands that you take into account variables such as:

Skills
Experience
Attitude
Demeanor
Customer service skills
Availability
Last-minute schedule changes
Current business demands

These “soft” variables are dramatically different from the “hard” data you may use when planning and executing your staffing process.

Wide focus vs. narrow focus

Staffing: The staffing process is best conducted with a wide focus.

Successful staffing takes into account a variety of variables, both inside and outside your business, including:

External business trends
Internal business trends
Economic trends
Customer preferences
Supply chain issues
And more

All of these variables can affect the staffing needs of your organization.

Scheduling: The scheduling process is best conducted with a narrow focus.

Ideally, once it’s time to schedule, you don’t want to have to analyze the state of the industry or the economic trends that are on the upswing at that time.

Instead, you want to narrow your focus to putting the right people in the right shifts so that the business can handle the traffic and customer demands of the time period in question.

Where staffing and scheduling support each other

Staffing and scheduling serve very different roles, but they rely on one another to ensure your organization’s success. When skilled people excel at their tasks, your organization functions well…as long as they’re there when you need them.

If scheduling is a challenge, it reveals skill and availability gaps. If staff have the right skills and capacity, staffing can be adjusted accordingly, and scheduling naturally falls into place.

Because staffing and scheduling are interdependent, organizations have to bring both processes together. Staffing decisions have to support scheduling needs, and the flow of a schedule determines staffing plans.

Restaurant staffing and scheduling example

One of the best ways to understand staffing and scheduling is to examine them through the analogy of restaurant management.

In a restaurant environment:

Staffing is the process of hiring chefs, kitchen help, wait staff, food runners, etc. so that you have enough people on staff with the right experience and skill to cover all open positions and handle both the menu and the customer flow.

Scheduling is the process of determining how many staff members of each role (i.e., chef, waiter, food runner, etc.) are needed throughout the day and assigning them to specific shifts.
In this case, effective staffing and scheduling are crucial for the business to run smoothly.

Ineffective staffing can lead to skill gaps and a lack of overall personnel for the jobs that need to be done, while ineffective scheduling can lead to overworked employees, safety issues, and unhappy customers.

How to improve staffing and scheduling

How to improve staffing

1) Analyze the current state of your business

It can be very difficult to improve something if you don’t have a starting point.

In the case of staffing, take the time to analyze the current state of your business — variables such as current resources, available staff, skills, org chart, and competencies — so you have the data you need to build a solid foundation for moving forward.

This kind of analysis should be done regularly to help your organization match the skills of its staff with current market demands and technology advances. This allows you to make timely strategic adjustments to staffing.

2) Build a staffing model

Building an effective staffing model is like setting specific goals for your business.

For example, you might want to have X full-time and Y part-time employees to handle the busy time of the year. Those numbers are your goal.

Your staffing model should include hiring criteria aligned with your organization’s mission, objectives, and values. Create a talent acquisition pipeline by connecting with professional and educational networks, as well as recruitment partners. This will save you time and money.

Offer career development pathways for your employees. These build leadership capabilities and skill development, as well as boost workforce retention.

Want more information about creating a staffing model for your business? Check out this article from the Sling blog: How To Build An Effective Staffing Model For Your Business.

3) Assemble a diverse team

Look at the balance of skills you’re adding to your organization. While you don’t want to hire more people than you need, you do want to create a team with a diverse set of skills.

Employees with different experiences (both in life and in work) will be better able to fill unexpected roles. They’ll also generate a wider range of ideas.

4) Cross-train employees

With a solid team in place and work running smoothly, you can add some training to your organization’s goals. Allowing staff to expand their skill sets builds a sense of resiliency.

If a staff member leaves their position, someone else will be able to step in, temporarily or permanently. And if your organization expands, employees may be able to expand or shift their roles, too.

5) Figure out what you need to reach your goals

Once you know where you are and where you want to go — the current state of your business and the staffing model, respectively — it becomes easier to figure out what you need to do to reach your goals.

Sit down on your own or with other managers and brainstorm ways to move your business from today into the future.

How to improve scheduling

1) Spend time with your staff

Get to know the people you work with so you know where they will thrive. If each person feels competent and useful, your organization will benefit. Learning about staff dynamics is important, too. If you group people who work well together, morale and productivity will improve.

2) Plan shifts with busy (and slow) times in mind

Look deeper into your business to identify typical workflow, peak activity periods, low activity periods, and seasonal fluctuations. Review historical data, operational requirements, and patterns of activity for days, weeks, months, and even years.

Then, use this information to plan shifts that provide the right number of employees for the activity level you’re likely to experience (based on past numbers). It will also help you identify when you need different skill levels at work.

3) Build shifts around skilled employees

Instead of starting with the first shift on Monday and working your way through to the last shift on Sunday, consider building shifts around skilled, experienced employees and then filling in other employees around them.

This sets you up for operational efficiency and customer satisfaction. It has the added benefit of creating learning environments within shifts, so mentor employees can model performance standards.

Schedule one or two of your best employees each shift and then go back through and add other, perhaps less skilled or experienced employees to those shifts.

Doing so serves two important purposes:

It ensures that each shift has at least one strong employee
It ensures that you have a core of experience that other team members can rely on and learn from

Assigning shifts in this way can help create stability across all shifts.

4) Plan “Plan B”

Make sure you have a backup plan so your workflow doesn’t get interrupted if you run into a problem or have an emergency. Your schedule can include a rotating group of on-call staff. Know who’s interested in extra work, too, so you ask the right people first.

5) Use software to streamline the process

One of the best ways to improve all aspects of your scheduling is to use software to streamline the process. Top-of-the-line workforce management software (such as Sling) lets you take advantage of automation that does a lot of the work for you.

For example, you can enter parameters such as employee availability, overtime limits, business budget, sales data, part-time/full-time status, skills, and abilities, and then instruct the system to schedule employees according to those variables.

Such automation can transform an activity that used to take hours into an activity that takes just minutes.

The impact of smart staffing and scheduling

1) Managing costs

When you make thoughtful, data-driven decisions about both staffing and scheduling, your organization can run more efficiently. You won’t have as much overtime expense and rate of employee turnover.

When you create work schedules that take employee availability and preference into account, you’ll also reduce employees opting out of shifts because of conflicts.

This predictability, as well as the “well-oiled machine” model that comes from employees spending consistent work time together, improves your level of service and strengthens employee bonds.

2) Improving productivity

Once you align your staffing and scheduling needs, you’ll reduce jammed-up workflow and downtime. You’ll maximize efficient resource usage, and profitability becomes more reliable, too.

3) Keeping staff (and keeping them happy)

You want your employees to have a satisfactory work-life balance. Creating smart staffing and scheduling choices makes that more likely. Your employees will be happier on the job and will want to stay with you.

Involving your staff in your scheduling process allows you to attend to the needs of your organization and your employees. You can reduce burnout and achieve necessary coverage.

Being conscientious when you need to make a work schedule change, giving your employees opportunities for time off, and being open to schedule swaps help your employees feel connected to your organization. As a result, they’ll be more likely to strive to do their best.

Manage staffing and scheduling with Sling

Now that you understand staffing and scheduling a bit better, it’s time to put them both into action. In most cases, that involves managing everything from the hiring and firing process to the way you organize and optimize your team and the shifts they work.

The Sling suite of tools can help you simplify and streamline all of that and give your business unprecedented control over the finer and more difficult points of workforce management, including:

Try Sling for free today to see how it can help you take your staffing plan off paper and make it into a reality.

And, for even more free resources to help you manage your business better, organize and schedule your team, and track and calculate labor costs, visit GetSling.com today.

Frequently asked questions

Where does a timesheet fit into the scheduling process?

Understanding your employees’ time is an important part of the scheduling process. You can only make adjustments to the flow of your organization when you see each separate piece of it. Timesheet automation is part of the software solution Sling.

What’s the best way to decrease employees’ hours?

If you need to cut costs and you’ve already trimmed other areas of your organization, you may want to decrease employees’ hours.

Be as honest and transparent as possible when you explain why you need to cut hours. If your employees feel trusted with real information, they may be more sympathetic and willing to make the necessary change.

Try to cut everyone’s hours. If people don’t feel like they’re being singled out, you’ll have a much better chance of coming out of this period of time stronger and more connected.

How can I manage conflict between staff members?

Strong communication skills are critical for managing conflict between staff members. Try inviting staff to speak openly and clearly in a neutral location and listening to all sides of the issue.

Be empathetic. Pay attention to where you hear common goals between the staff members who are in conflict. If you can find connections between them first, you can better address where they diverge. Build a resolution from there.

Work with your staff to develop an action plan that focuses on the problems and not the people. Create clear guidelines, follow through right away, and follow up as soon as you can.

This content is for informational purposes and is not intended as legal, tax, HR, or any other professional advice. Please contact an attorney or other professional for specific advice.

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