Staffing Defined
What exactly is staffing? For purposes of this course, staffing is defined as the process of acquiring, deploying, and retaining a workforce of sufficient quantity and quality to create positive impacts in the organization's effectiveness. Alright so there's a lot going on here, a big definition. I want to breakout its implications. First off, you see acquire, deploy, and retain, key words in the process of staffing. So a acquiring is referring to external hiring here both initial in its staffing an organization to get it started, but it's also ongoing. deployment is the placement of new hires in actual jobs. This might not be the first thing you think of with staffing. In many cases, though the process you might imagine it is what we do see, which is an organization has a specific job they want to fill and they go out and hire someone to fill it. So the deployment of employee and kind of placing that person into a job, it's already been figured out before you can go about acquiring that employee. This isn't always the case. There's different times where someone is hired and then it's determined after this point, where they'd be placed in the organization. And if you'd spend a moment, think, where does this happen most often, well this occurs in many places but the military is an example where deployment is very important because you have many people come and go through basic training. If you think about the US army, and then what happens after that, well that's where it might be, just based on the needs of the organization, so if the infantry are really needed guess what, most everyone's going to going to infantry. However, might be that there's options and the military has different needs. And at that time they might look at: what are the interests of the unique knowledge, skills and abilities that a recruit offers and they might deploy them and place that person into a specific job based on what they can to bring to the table. Finally retaining, retention is a part of the staffing definition so this just is keeping employees right? There might be a time where some level of turnover is okay to the organization, but at a base level, organizations need to retain employees to keep things working right? Staffing is also a process or system it's not just an event. That's important note as we go through this course. Finally, quantity and quality both matter in fact they interact with each other. Higher quality can mean that you need a less quantity and vice versa. Now what about organization effectiveness. What do we mean? The short answer can mean a few different things, right? In order to be effective you would probably want to be profitable as an organization. You certainly want to survive, but keep your doors open. Growth is an outcome of many organizations that they would like to see happen. Right so what's required for this new and what are the unique outcome variables that are evaluated to determine if an organization is effective. We might look at the performance of individuals within the organization, both their task performance so how well are they performing the specific duties that they've been hired to do but also their organizational citizenship behavior. This gets at the degree to which employees go above and beyond just the basic requirements of their job to make the organization a better place to work at, right? They speak well of the organization, they help out, they're not quick to just work to rule and do the very minimum it takes to get the job done right these are all types of organizational citizenship behaviors, you might evaluate that. But you would also evaluate the effectiveness of leaders, maybe as subordinates, how they perceive the leaders. You might evaluate organizational commitment and could evaluate the integrity of employees, or counterproductive work behaviors, kind of bad things employees do. So you take these and then look at them across the organization. Give some various ways to consider an organization's effectiveness. Please introduce yourself to a few things that can go beyond just the accounting and finance measures that you might first think of when you think of organizational effectiveness. So again profitability kind of growth in revenue. things like that.