Planning Your Staff

Within the next decade, a large part of Australia's workforce is planning to retire. This, combined with people’s increased willingness to change jobs, mean businesses can no longer expect to get and keep quality staff without any planning.

When workforce action planning you need to consider:

• the problems your business is currently facing
• the future; what business objectives would you like to achieve?
• how you could achieve these objectives

	Workforce Action Plan (DOC 74Kb)
	This Workforce Action Plan Template assists in creating a staff plan for your company. Download and adjust to your company's needs.

Questions to ask yourself

Ask yourself the following questions when workforce action planning.

Your business now:

• what skills are critical to your business: if you couldn’t find someone to fill the job would it hurt your business significantly?
• what position will work best in your business: consider your options, up-skilling existing workers and hiring a junior to fill a gap could be a better solution to your skills shortage than hiring someone with existing skills for a senior role
• what can you afford: this doesn’t just mean wages, you’ll also need to think about turnover, loss of training, inexperience and long term vacancies if there is a high turnover of staff due to badly thought out jobs

Your business in the future:

• what are your likely resourcing needs in the next year: will this change in three to five years and if so, how are you planning for it?
• what skills do you want more or less of: what are the critical jobs you will need to make your business plan happen (do you already have the skills in your business, can you build them or will you need to recruit)?
• can you predict anything about your future workers: will there be staff shortages in particular areas of work or skills which will no longer be needed?

	Human Resources Manual Template (DOC 252Kb)
	This Human Resource Manual Template offers the guidelines on how you can individually adjust this document to suit your company's needs.

This template is an example only. Ensure that you customise it to your business checking it against employment instrument(s) e.g. awards that cover your workplace, current policies and procedures.

	Human Resources Policy and Procedures Checklist (RTF 232Kb)
	This checklist helps to identify if you have included relevent information in your formal recruitment documents