One of the most important things for a manager is to make sure the company is staffed appropriately and make sure that there are not to many employees, but also that there are enough employees to perform the job. For each employee which is employed by a company they cost more than just their salary to perform their job. There are more expenses associated with each employee such as sick time, vacation time, benefits and training. Each time a new employee is hired there is a length of time in which you must pay them their salary while they are not actually being productive but they are learning to be productive.
There are two methods to staffing an office with staffing, there is a more general method which states that you need X amount of staff and each employee has X number of days which are productive. While the other method is scheduled-position staffing which is when a company predicts an increased need of staff at or around a particular time due to projects or increase in business. With annualized method it is important to understand how many productive days each employee, this is done by taking the amount of work days in a company if ran seven days a week the company has 364 work days. If a particular employee works five days a week you must minus these since they are not productive days. You also subtract the number of person days and sick time, along with any other days the employee is able to take off paid such as education days. These days the employee is paid but it is not a productive day for the company. After doing all of this, the total number of days the company is open is divided by productive days per employee. This will help the company understand how many employees they need to be productive for one position. Scheduled position requires the company to do some monitoring and can require some more risks since the company is basing the staff on information which can change, or projects which may be cancelled.
Annualizing staff is a more straight forward way of staffing a company since all that must be done is figuring out the productive and nonproductive days of each employee. After figuring this out it is a fairly easy process in which can be done quickly and without much difficulty, all that is needed is some simple math. Annualizing staff takes away from the risk of worrying about projects which may or may not happen. Annualizing staff does not always work, in health care it is easy to annualize staff and there is not much fluctuation in patients or need for staff. If the company is in retail though more staff is needed during the holidays rather than the rest of the year so annualizing staff is slightly more difficult. No matter the employee staffing method used, it is important to know how many days each employee works and how many days this employee can miss work causing the need for another employee to take their place.
Productive and nonproductive days are one of the most important things that a manager can watch and track. The last thing a manager wants to do is have the company running short possibly causing a loss of life due to overcrowded rooms and slow patient care. The benefit of figuring out the productive and nonproductive days is pretty straight forward. Depending on the health care setting there may be an increase during the winter months due to the weather and bad driving conditions. In a pre-hospital setting the weather plays an important role in staffing. During bad storms and times in which transports are response to patient is going to take an increased amount of time more ambulances may be placed on the road making for a better response. Not only is the issue response times but also vehicle accidents increase during the bad weather. While being accurate with the staff needed to perform a job is important for budgeting, there needs to some “play room” in the budget to make sure there resources can be added in order to provide for the patients which may be needed.