Do You Really Need More Staff? Evaluating Your Business Needs

If your business has struggled with capacity or production deadlines recently, then one of your 2025 New Year’s resolutions may be to increase staffing in such or such department. However, before you pick up the phone or email your recruitment agency, it’s worth asking the question of whether you really need more staff right now. In this article, we’ll look at a few methods to assess whether or not your business genuinely needs more people, or if there are alternative solutions to help you manage your workload.

Step One: Evaluate Your Current Workload

An analysis of the root causes of your increased work load will help you to pinpoint areas in which efficiencies can be made, and potentially reduce the need for immediate hiring.

• Breakdown your tasks – make a list or workflow of all responsibilities and the time required for each. Categorise these responsibilities into groups, including high-value strategic tasks and repetitive operational duties.
• Analyse your workflows for bottlenecks – try to identify any bottlenecks in your processes, e.g., does email marketing take more time than it should because of outdated software?
• Talk to your team about their pain points – your current employees are on the frontline of your work load, so ask them about the areas they’re struggling with and what tasks feel unnecessarily time-intensive or frustrating. Are there any recurring issues or problems that they face?

Step Two: Identify Inefficiencies

After mapping out your workload, you’ll have a better idea about which inefficiencies could be eliminated, streamline, or simplified. Start by looking at the following:

1. Repetitive tasks: start with tasks that are repetitive or follow a predictable pattern. These low value, resource-hungry tasks are often prime candidates for automation, streamlining, or outsourcing, and could save your existing team considerable time and resources.

2. Underutilised skills and resources: analyse whether your current team have hidden capacities to take on more work in certain areas. For instance, are there skills currently being underutilised due to poor task allocation, or because your employees are too tied up with admin or inefficient processes.

3. Process gaps: identify areas where a lot of time is spent on manual intervention, e.g., manual data entry between tools that don’t integrate is a huge waste of staff time and effort.

Addressing these inefficiencies can help reduce the workload burden on your existing team without increasing your headcount.

Step Three: Invest In Time-Saving Solutions And Software

There are various strategies for resolving inefficiencies that don’t require hiring additional employees, for example:

Automation: investing in software systems or tools that handle your repetitive and routine tasks can free up employees for higher value activities. Tasks such as CRM data entry, marketing scheduling, and routine customer support can, for instance, often be handled through an automated platform, such as HubSpot.

An email marketing automation tool, for example, could automate your routine email follow-ups and send out abandoned cart reminders, chatbots can answer basic questions on your website and reduce inbound calls and emails, and automated invoicing software can streamline customer billing payments, and tax reporting.

Outsourcing: outsourcing some of your functions to a carefully chosen supply partner or agency gives you access to specialised expertise and headcount without having to hire full-time staff in-house. A wide range of common business functions can now be outsourced, from content creation to IT support, bookkeeping, marketing, recruitment, and HR management. Prime candidates for outsourcing are tasks that don’t require in-depth knowledge of your company’s operations, and which can be handled by an agency or freelance without day-to-day management by one of your team.

Step Four: Pilot And Measure Alternative Strategies

Before committing to a time-saving or efficiency measure, test on a small scale to see whether it is effective, and carefully monitor and analyse your results. One way to do this is to run a small-scale pilot test, such as introducing an automation tool for a specific workflow, or by outsourcing non-core work to a contractor for a few weeks. For each pilot scheme, set key metrics and criteria for success, such as the time saved, costs reduced, or tasks completed more efficiently. A/B test the before and after results of implementing each solution – this will help you to learn from your results and tweak the process. If a solution doesn’t work as expected immediately, you may be able to make adjustments based on data to improve its efficiency.

Step Five: Reassess Your Recruitment Needs

After testing and implementing various workload management alternatives, now you can revisit your staffing requirements with a better idea about how manageable your workload is with existing resources. If certain tasks still overwhelm your team or you expect an increase in demand over the next 12 months, you’ll have a clearer idea about whether hiring is necessary, and for what roles.

Next Steps

Get in touch with JDR today to find out how marketing automation and working with an experienced agency can save your business time and money, and help maximise the value and resources of your team.

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