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hello everybody and welcome to this quick tip from the managers resource handbook you can visit us on the web at WWE and book calm for all sorts of tools tips and advice from other managers our goal is to help managers and businesses succeed through our experience my name is Timmy we're gonna be talking today about how to justify an increase in your staff and this is easily one of the most frustrating things for a manager and that's you always feel like you're understaffed not having enough people or enough hours and the day to get things done and it's easily one of those things that just it really upsets people and it just seems like it's always in the top e of mind and you can never seem to get an approval to get one more person or whatever the case may be so we'll be talking about that today but before we get to that let's just talk about a couple reasons as to why getting staff is such a hard thing and the first reason is financially people represent the largest expense for a company and it's not just the salary right it's the salary it's the benefits it's getting another computer it's getting another set of licenses for software all sorts of things that you know you may not think about so usually you know they say about you know anywhere from say thirty to fifty percent over the actual salary of the employee is what they cost because of all those additional costs and expenses so people are very expensive and then secondly you know many managers actually fail to critically evaluate what they need and the type of help they actually require so for example so it's October you're looking to get some help for the next few months especially to help pack boxes in your shipping department for the holidays a lot of managers fail to really say hey I don't need full-time employees I just need you know two months worth of labor to help me and unfortunately unless you've put together rock-solid justification you know business leaders aren't really gonna they're not gonna bite right they're not gonna want to add that cost unless you will explain what you're looking for and why you need it okay so the following slides you can download them for free on our website again managers resource handbook com so you can download them there if you want but this is basically a fictitious example but certainly I've gone through this type of thing many times in my career and so when it comes to adding staff to my teams I've kind of put a similar business case together after each slide we'll talk about what you know the type of information that's there and why we presented it so without further ado today we're gonna be talking about the future state of acne IT services and this is a fictitious company but just for the purposes of our discussion we've we've given it a name today our goal is to improve talk about improving customer satisfaction and employee satisfaction so let's start by looking at three data points we have a stated company initiative to improve our customer service scores by 10% last year we were at 73% this year we want to be at 83% secondly last year's employee survey scored employee satisfaction at 64% which really isn't very good that's pretty poor actually our third data point is that project fireside Overland budget by 17% and schedule by 20% due to resource limitations so here's why I put these things here right the first thing there is to tie whatever you're talking about to some sort of key goal that the company has in this case it's improving customer satisfaction scores the second thing is I'm just stating facts right using facts to say that you know indisputable data suggests that there's a need for action right 64 percent employee satisfaction well business leader wants to see that 64 percent of their employees are happy right so obviously there's a need for action there and then lastly the third point here really highlights that there's an example of the impact felt by the business as a result of the staffing levels in this case you know some project may be a main project overlaying budget and then also you know exact seeded schedule by 20% and was late because of staffing so you know these are obviously points that you want to kind of just put forth that allow business leaders to say okay yeah okay I see some data there so let's talk about the current state of acne IT services and look at it through the lens of a few different people so our customers basically have told us that you know that we are slower than desired in our response time they believe we're unable to accommodate changes quickly so in other words if they want you know if their requirements state X and then later on they change to Y takes us a really long time to really accommodate that change and some of our customers have even gone so far as to say that acne employees always seem tired for example one employ one customer called and said hey I was really glad your employee sent that over last night but it was at 11 o'clock at night you know why are your employees working at 11 o'clock at night doesn't seem doesn't seem right from an employee perspective we've found that our employees feel that they're not effectively supporting the business they don't feel they're doing a good job they feel their quality of work is suffering that they're finding errors for example with project fire side the reason we were over budget was because people were making mistakes and they had to go back and be corrected they feel that there's a lack of focus on internal initiatives we are solely supporting our customers next employees feel that time for personal development is very very limited and they feel that they're working long hours on a regular basis and we'll come back to that in a little bit finally if we look at it from a business perspective right we've got work we've got a new business coming in so we've got work that exists for adding additional staff we also are not really building a better organization we're really just maintaining or taking on more work but we're not really growing with that business and then we've got insufficient support for other internal teams right so there's only so many hours that can be fit into a day and basically all we're doing is taking care of customers we're not actually focusing on Grille our business and healthy manner so let's look at this slide here there's three things that I've highlighted here first is you know point four there says you know identify the view your customers have of you right so really what does it imply for future business you know if your customers don't have a very good view of you there is some risk there that that will have an impact on you in the future pull some information and perspective from employees right again no business leader wants to see that his his or her employees are unhappy so if you can provide some insight as to you know what employees have to say about the situation you know tie it to things like the product quality tie it to things like morale or things that they want that are not being given the opportunity to to pursue so you may want to throw some employee feedback in here and then again from a current state standpoint look at it from you know lastly a business perspective right when you're asking for resources you always need to tie to some sort of business need right keep it to an objective discussion not subjective okay so make sure that there's some sort of factual you know things that people will be able to understand and kind of support okay so the last six months we've collected some employee we've been tracking time for our employees we've collected the amount of time they've been putting in each week and you can see based on the data that we basically are averaging about 800 hours per week or so when our capacity if our employees are at a sustainable level of work are around closer to 680 or so so basically you know six months of data shows that we are essentially three heads deficient in terms of our capacity and you know it's a it's a very good point to make here that you know these hours are strictly going to supporting projects and customers they're not going towards internal development you know improving our processes and standards improving some of our methods and techniques really building the organization it's purely sustaining okay so in this slide I can't emphasize enough that data is your number one friend when it comes to asking for resources if your company does track time formally then you know go pull data you want to be a you know a significant amount of time not just two weeks or maybe a month but you want to show that it's a trend you want to show that it's a condition it's not just a spike because of some big project or something like that you want to show that it's it's a kind of an ongoing issue okay if you don't track time formally you know you as the manager need to really take time and either create a spreadsheet have your employees fill it in each week something like that but collect the data somehow and I'll tell you what if you don't track time formally and all of a sudden you go in front of an executive and say hey here's the data that that we don't track but I've collected it that's gonna be really really powerful so it's important that you really do some thorough analysis and you look at trends you know just look at a short period of time okay so let's look at the current state relative to where we want to go in terms of a future state so our current state you know we're slow to respond to customers so to get better our future state will look like you know something like we want to turnaround quotes to new customers in one day and we want to decrease our hold time by customers by 20% when they're on the phone so you know tying back into the whole objective to you know improve our customer satisfaction scores we want to be able to turn culture around faster and decrease phone call time by 20% next you know right now we're in a perpetual mode of firefighting we really want to get towards a state where we're improving the stability we're able to weather storms easily rather than always sort of be on thin ice with some sort of major issue that pops up and we want to improve our internal development we want to be able to improve our processes our techniques our methods to make ourselves faster and more efficient and bad and overall just more competitive as a company and then from a current state situation with respect to our people you know right now we've got a weakened state of quality of work we've got poor employee satisfaction scores and consistently long hours as the data shows from a future state standpoint we really want to improve the engagement - morale of our staff and we want to improve the work/life balance of our people right we want to reduce turnover we want to make people feel like they're doing a good job so in this slide what I've done is I've really compared the current state to the future state where we're going right so it's important to show that there is a transition and to meet that transition it's not just or to bridge that gap it's not just a matter of simply you know changing something it's a matter of taking action to deliver you know new tangible results so again you look at it from a few different perspectives customers to business and people not just you know through one lens but look through it look look at the issue through multiple lenses so if we look at the future state you know what we want our customers experience to be is an improved and what we want them to see a improved response time minimal waiting when they're on the telephone we want to be able to quickly react to changes and as the customer needs us to do and we want to have our customers interact with happy employees employees who aren't tired because they got home to 8 o'clock the night before and they got in at 7 a.m. but we want our you know we want our frontline staff there to be energetic and have our customers have a good experience we want our employees to feel like they're doing a good job we want to make sure that our employees feel like we value them doing a good job we want to allow them to pursue you know development opportunities and career growth we want to allow our employees to dedicate sometimes internal initiatives say they've got some great ideas to make something better we want to make sure that we allow that in our staffing level and we want to be able to create an environment of stability not a firefighting you know perpetual firefighting mode and then from a business perspective our goal is really to improve customer retention and referrals by you know delivering better customer support we want to increase employee retention and and maintaining those relationships between customers and employees we want to hold on to our employees through a better work/life balance this is also a financial and benefit by not having to recruit and hire more employees over time as others leave and we want to focus on internal growth that leads to ourselves to innovation and competitive advantage we really want to focus using our employees knowledge to drive our growth and strengthen us as a company so here on this slide I'm really trying to outline things that will resonate with you know again business leaders they want to you know they're gonna want to see that the benefit of adding staff is an improved customer experience we want to highlight that employees will be happier because they'll be working a little bit less and they can have some more time to really do a good job so it's more of a rewarding experience for custom sorry employees and then I'm going from a business standpoint that there are some benefits again focusing on benefits think of it as I return on the investment okay so again tying benefits in a future state and showing that there will be some enhancements it's not just more people but there's actually something good coming with it so let's talk about implementation to implement the future state our goal here is really to readily support the business needs through improved responsiveness and employee effectiveness okay so we've got three recommended three recommended additions to our staff based on the data we saw earlier the first is to you know our goal here is to decrease quoting time to customers by adding one pricing specialist focused on strictly new accounts so this is adding a specialist to focus on turning around quotes to customers the second hire we're looking to add is you know really targeting and improved customer experience and this person will be a customer service rep somebody who's answering the phones handling any customer questions or concerns and then you know although there's no specific additional you know role that we're looking for adding we want to reduce lost productivity time of administrative tasks on our current staff overall so we want to add an assistant to support the entire department so basically things like filing expense reports handling various administration things we want to have just a central admin that handles that and takes that five percent of time away from everybody that they spend you know clicking the mouse for just you know silly actions we want our pricing people to be pricing we want our software people to be developing software we want our technical team to be in you know answering the phone and it's providing technical support for customers we don't want them doing administrative time so we want to get an assistant to support the entire team so on this slide what I'm trying to do is essentially identify that you know taking that data that I showed before of about a three on average three heads worth of people that's you know missing from the group and where we want to put them I don't just want to say I need three people you know you want to be able to say I need three people and here's where I need them and why I need them there so really again it's it's a business discussion right it's a business case you want to show that you've done enough homework to say that hey here are the three areas I think as the manager or the leader where I could use the help and then what it's going to again business think about in terms of benefit here's what it's going to give me so if I'm the kind of from an org chart standpoint you see the three green boxes as to where these employees will sit as we mentioned one will be an admin who supports the overall organization and supporting and taking on some of those administrative activities we want to add a customer service rep to improve you know the customer experience and to reduce call times and we want to add a pricing specialist someone who can help turnaround quotes for new accounts so in this slide what I'm trying to show is you know you want to be very specific as to where that help is needed you don't just want to say you know you need three as I mentioned before you want to say I need three and this is where the most effective place is to put those employees you want to make sure it's clear to show that you've that you've thought about how they are going to fit in the organization perhaps in terms of skill levels what sub team they might be on what function they might perform perhaps number of years of experience that you're looking for but you want to be very specific to illustrate that you've really thought about it and it makes sense so in terms of some remaining questions first of all can we plan in our staffing level to allow one week of professional development for each employee you know each employee you know we want to allow them to grow professionally and develop skills so CLE allow for one week a year perhaps to attend some sort of training or seminar of their choosing what is the resourcing plan for supporting the five-year goals so the company's got some initiatives over the next five years what staff do we need to have now in order to deliver against those goals that we want you know that place where we want to be in five years and then lastly with new product launches coming next year will the programming team need some additional capacity you want to kind of frame the discussion here around you know what kind of alluding to future future activities so for example it does the programming team need a digital capacity recognizing what's coming down the pipe so this slide we have basically done is trying to just move you know identify that there's some new sense right so let's acknowledge that you don't have every answer it gives the audience sort of a natural point at which they can ask questions and provide any feedback even if the feedback is something like hey you know I know you asked him for three but do you think we can get away with two it's a good conversation - it's a good way to start having a conversation about okay got it I got the point I got the data I see what you're saying let's have a let's have conversation about what we really want to do and it's basically allows whoever you're presenting to your boss maybe an executive or whoever it is to kind of say you know there's a couple other things I'd like you to look at and those are that's the point at which you know you've sort of locked you've gotten some alignment you said you know they may not give you all three they may not just say okay no problem they're not like it to do that you know whatsoever but it at least is going to give you information feedback as to where that perhaps the concerns are maybe some other considerations they'd like you to look at and you you know really just kind of lead it to the next step really the objective of the remaining question slide is to get you to the next conversation which is hey I've taken all the actions I've taken all the notes went back through the information here is an update to what I think we want to do so this is really leading to getting you in front of them for the next conversation so it's not just a brand new topic it's something that you know you're following up on okay so that does it so that was our example of how to presentation about how you might want to justify additional staff again you can download this presentation for free on our website at managers resource handbook comm under the tools and templates page again this is a fictitious company but hopefully this example shows you some of the information that you're going to want to prepare let me enjoy this and we'll see you next time here at the quick tip