How to Set Up Your Business for an Expansion of the Workforce

Growth is ultimately the aim of most businesses. One of the by-products of this kind of success is the increase in workload, and only so much of this can be put on the current workforce before you are forced to expand your numbers. This requires careful planning and consideration as to how to accomplish this effectively. Here is how to set up your business to expand your workforce with the minimum of disruption. 

Space Requirements

The first thing to consider when taking on new people is where are you going to put them? Just taking the personnel on is expensive, so we want to ensure we are entirely aware of any additional costs before committing to this course of action. Depending on the job, it is becoming more and more common now for many of us to work from home. Maybe this can be offered as an option to existing and new staff as it may prove appealing to many as factors such as childcare are more of a stress than ever. Other ways of maximizing available space are to operate shift patterns to stagger employees so that they are not all in the building at the same time.

Staff Training

There could be a cost of training new staff in a couple of ways. Firstly, it’s going to take time to get them used to the job, even learning takes up their time and senior staff, all of which costs money. Secondly, you could be sending them on professional training courses, which could be anything from essential health and safety, right up to skills courses that are industry, or job role, specific. 

Admin & Logistics

Extra staff inevitably means more admin and logistics support to be able to accommodate these additional workers. You will have to process their payroll, deal with absences, vacation time, and continued professional development monitoring. All of this is time and resource-intensive and should not be neglected when planning this as unsupported staff can be more of a burden than an asset. Some tools can assist in organizing these aspects of the job; a timesheet app can make keeping track of shifts considerably easier. It’s all about getting the help you can get.

Assigning Staff to Expansion

It is worth assigning a manager or even a management team to oversee the staff expansion program. This allows a point of contact for existing staff, new staff, and for you to check progress and issues. This is a delicate balancing act between throwing too many resources at this and costing way too much or conversely not keeping track of the project and allowing costs to spiral out of control and progress to slow or halt without you even knowing it.

Equipment

What equipment do the new people need? It is rare to have an employee who needs nothing. Examples of this could include new uniforms, and you need to wither have a vast stock of this to suit varying sizes or have them tailor-made for each member of staff. You might need PCs for office staff or software developers, and this brings the following question of do you have enough bandwidth or do you need a higher speed business internet connection. On site workers will need PPE, extra vehicles, and workwear. 

Contracts & Hiring

We need to be mindful of getting the hiring process right. This includes writing the correct advert to attract the optimum selection of candidates to ensure that as little time as possible is spent combing through applications from individuals who are unsuitable or unqualified for the positions requiring to be filled. You could use a professional recruiter to be able to do this for you, and they will take the hard graft out of screening candidates, can perform relevant background checks and prevent a shortlist of suitable and screened candidates. Contract details are of vital importance as if you get these wrong then it can come back to haunt you in a big way. You need to decide if you are taking on people on a permanent or temporary basis. There are advantages to both approaches. Permanent contracts will attract a higher calibre of candidates as they are not as likely to be drawn by uncertainty. However, if things go wrong if you have permanent employees it can be considerably expensive to break these contracts. Temp contracts can give more flexibility and can always be made permanent later if the people impress.

hiring concept -DepositPhotos

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