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 taking on new entrants to the workforce and training them
• 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 316Kb)
	A comprehensive Human Resources Manual Template with standard policies and procedures which you can adapt to suit the needs of your business.

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

	Checklist for Human Resources Policy and Procedures (DOC 494Kb)
	This checklist helps to find out if you have included relevant information in your formal recruitment documents