Balance Your Staffing

by Diane M. Calabrese | Published September 2025

 

 

Find, hire, train, retain, reward. Just how many facets does staffing have?

Many.

But perhaps the most significant one is balance. Somewhere between too-often idle hands and minds and harried dedicated employees, there exists the optimal level of staffing.

Optimal in the sense that a transient pulse in workload can be met by the team, while a temporary lull signals employees that they should make good use of the extra time to refine processes and procedures – or just cleanup virtual and real-world clutter.

There’s nothing negative about the word redundancy when it applies to team members who can cross over and take on the work of others if the need arises. We want to know that there’s more than one person in the cockpit who can fly the plane.

Just as we want to know there’s more than one person who can take and fill our order for parts or chemicals essential for operating our business. A customer-trusted sales representative may be on vacation, but the representative’s regular buyers are not.

Thus, make crossover flexibility part of staffing. And make that crossover with competence and good cheer – no staff member who signals by words or sighs that he or she is filling in reluctantly.

Which is the most difficult part of the effort to achieve optimal staffing throughout the year? “Dealing with unexpected absences,” says Christina Vargas, the human resources manager at Chappell Supply and Equipment in Oklahoma City, OK.

Even with the best planning, there will be times when a team member cannot be at work – no need to dwell on the things that can happen unexpectedly because we have all been there. The unexpected, unfortunately, is very likely to be a sad or negative event in an employee’s life.

Fortunately, team members naturally pull harder together to fill in and help one another when something unfortunate happens. After the urgency passes, there are ways to handle an extended unexpected absence.

Companies have the option of getting help from a staffing agency. Does Vargas’ company ever use temporary staffing? “Yes, we do,” she says.

Preparation of staff that includes equipping employees to be able to fill more than one role at a company can be a big help should there be an unexpected absence. “[We] do crossover training,” says Vargas. “It works very well when someone is absent.”

Equilibrium

The seafaring expression ‘steady as she goes’ applies to staffing. Every employer wants to maintain the optimal number of team members. But the situation is never static.

Challenges akin to rough seas for the nautical helmsman are a given. A business owner does not know from where the next perturbation will come, but it will come whether in the form of a tornado or a tariff or a to-be-determined.

Indeed, even the boons to business can simultaneously be challenges that put a company off balance. Consider the positives of being able to receive orders by phone, text, email, etc.

Is there any downside to opening so many paths for communication? “One of the biggest challenges is the inconsistency in demand across multiple channels,” says Ken Hebert, vice president marketing – North America, at BluBird Industries in Sheridan, WY.

Multiple channels are not the only challenge in meeting the goal of optimal staffing. Hebert’s company serves customers in many different industries.

Each industry has its own annual buying profile. “Pressure washing seasonality peaks differently from automotive or retail, so we’re constantly recalibrating resources,” explains Hebert.

It’s more than channels and seasons that present challenges in staffing. “In addition, the unpredictability of employee absences, especially in key roles, can disrupt workflow, so we’ve placed extra focus on redundancy and flexible scheduling,” says Hebert.

Does Hebert’s company encourage crossover training among employees? “Absolutely,” he says

“Cross-training has become a key part of our operations culture,” explains Hebert. “In manufacturing and logistics, having team members who can operate across functions, like handling both inbound materials and outbound shipments, gives us real flexibility.”

Temporary employees also sometimes help meet staffing needs at Hebert’s company. “[Particularly] in warehouse or fulfillment roles where demand spikes,” he says. “For example, during new product launches or seasonal pushes, we may bring in temporary staff to maintain delivery commitments.”

But there’s an important caveat to adding temporary hires. “[For] customer-facing roles or anything brand-critical, we rely strictly on trained, full-time team members to maintain consistency,” explains Hebert.

Consultants who can bring a fresh perspective to a company include those with expertise in staff evaluation and optimization. Has Hebert’s company ever brought in such a consultant?

“Yes,” says Hebert. “[Our company] has worked with consultants on a case-by-case basis, typically when optimizing our customer service representatives. While we maintain strong internal HR and operations teams, a consultant can help with best practices.”

Who might consider bringing in a consultant? “I’d recommend consultants, especially if you’re growing quickly or feeling reactive rather than proactive with your staffing model,” says Hebert.

Constancy

In the 21st century the concept of a business operating with a hierarchical framework has not exactly become taboo. But most companies try to soften the notion that there’s a chain of command and control.

Nevertheless, someone must quietly oversee a group of people. If not precisely in charge, final decisions must reside with someone. That someone is most likely the owner or the general manager.

What happens when the general manager and/or the owner are unexpectedly absent? Who makes decisions when decisions must be made?

While cross-over training and flexibility can fortify a company, there must also be a mechanism in place for substituting for a missing decision maker. An employer who avoids the issue of how the chain of command – really the chain of decision-making, works could be setting up a company for calamity.

The more autonomous and well-trained employees are, the less they may believe they require someone to set priorities and boundaries. Without a designated substitute for the decision maker(s), a company opens itself to confusion among staff.

Optimal staffing must include a component of who reports to whom, and how the reporting structure gets amended in the instance of absences. Moreover, staff must respect the reporting structure and adhere to it. (No one should be rushing over and trying to grab the wheel from the interim helmsman.)

Staff that sustain a business in difficult times and allow a business to grow in fruitful intervals are in place because of the care taken during recruitment and hiring. Care that’s followed by clarity in what the expectations are for an employee.

Companies looking for advice on where to begin when refining staffing can contract with a consultant. They can also take advantage of free advice offered by the U.S. Office of Personnel Management (OPM.gov).

OPM is a federal entity that assists federal agencies in the recruitment and hiring of federal employees. Much of the material at the OPM website is open access and businesses seeking ideas as they strive to improve their own efforts to hire with prudence and purpose can find useful insights there.

Cost-effectiveness in deployment of employees is a concern that should be a part of staffing solutions. And OPM offers advice on that and much more.

The issue of cost-effectiveness is one that should be part of every business decision, of course. But is it?

With staffing efforts there’s plenty of due diligence in hiring, training and cross-training of employees. In 2025, however, there may not be comparable due diligence in the deployment of technological substitutes for humans. Consider Chatbots.

Flexibility is an expectation for employees. But the bots may be so rigidly scripted that they become a source of frustration for customers.

Before substituting a bot for a human employee, a business owner should get to know the bot just as he or she would an employee. The same applies to automated response systems for placing and tracking orders. (Test everything.)

Staff who must spend their time trying to counter the negative experiences that customers/prospective customers had with bots or limited choices of an automated phone system will also become frustrated. Disgruntled customers and agitated employees destabilize businesses.

In short, do the simple things first. Recommendations about how to elevate the morale of employees are plentiful. The U.S. Small Business Administration (SBA.gov) suggests incentive programs to enhance retention and recruitment of staff.

Among the incentives SBA names are flex time, wellness programs, and company events. Of course, flex time opens a whole new staffing issue – albeit with planned absences.

Before sending employees off to a wellness program or allowing them to take unscheduled time off, a business owner should be certain such diversions from the workday make sense. Talk to team members and listen to what they say.

Proper tools, predictable (mostly) workload, polite interactions, and possibilities for learning are among the top things that staff want, assuming fair remuneration is a given. And although it’s not really in vogue to say it, they also want clear direction and the knowledge that someone is in charge. That is, autonomy backstopped by a decision maker