Comprehensive Staff Planning Report for Arcadia Group's Growth

This report focuses on creating a staff planning strategy for the Arcadia Group, a multinational clothing retailer. It examines the importance of staff planning in achieving organizational goals, including profitability and market reach. The report outlines different types of staffing, such as temporary, long-term, and strategic staffing, and analyzes how Arcadia Group can implement these to meet its business objectives. It highlights the significance of understanding employee needs and the role of various departments, like Human Resources and Marketing, in achieving departmental goals. The report also explores the skills required for specific roles, the impact of economic, technological, and financial factors on staffing, and ways to improve staff planning. The conclusion emphasizes the vital role of effective staff planning in supporting the company's objectives and overall success.

Creating a staffing plan

Table of Contents
INTRODUCTION...........................................................................................................................3
Create a staff planning................................................................................................................3
CONCLUSION................................................................................................................................7
REFERENCES................................................................................................................................8

INTRODUCTION
Workforce stands crucial for an organisation and every business require and feel the
importance of staff planning in order to achieve their determined goals (Perez‐Estebanez,
Urquía‐Grande and Rautiainen, 2018). Staff planning is a procedure of hiring and retaining the
best employee so that goals of higher profitability and market reach can be fulfilled. Arcadia is
private multinational clothing retailing company. Headquarter of this company is in London,
UK. It has some departmental stores such as self ridges, Debenhams and other several franchises
in other countries. This study will show focus on creating a staffing plan so that sustainability in
the organisation can be maintained. about way of the best staff planning and organisational as
well as departmental goals. This report will also focus on evaluating organisational goals so that
suitable plans could be formed.
Create a staff planning
Staff planning is a process in order to ensure that company possess suitable and
competent employees to perform its activities. The main purpose of staffing plan is to achieve
business growth and success by hiring the right people with right skills and knowledge. There are
mainly three types of staffing that include temporary staffing, long-term staffing and strategic
staffing.
Short-term or temporary staffing: Short-term or temporary staffing plan concentrate on
the immediate needs and requirements of the company. For example, if an individual owns a
retail store and holiday shopping season then their short-term staff planning will focus on finding
additional workers specifically for the season.
Long-term staffing: Long term staffing plan covers at least 1 year. In this type of staff
planning, company and managers need to analyse and keep all the factors like past turnover, and
the workers who may be retiring or have retired and taking leaves like maternity leaves etc. After
defining and analysing expected staffing needs, company can develop a plan in order to help
recruit and hire the right talent (Nanlohy, Bambang and Hutabarat, 2015).
Strategic staffing: This type of staff planning involves both type short-term and long-
term planning. In this type of staff planning, company and managers evaluate staffing levels in
order to determine surplus or deficit in context of the workforce. It also assesses the skills of

workers to determine that existing employees and team lacks the ability that are needed to
support the company move forward.
Arcadia group is a British multinational retailing private Ltd company headquartered in
London, UK. This company's main goal and objective is to expand and grow the business by
innovating and developing the unique clothes and accessories. The main goal for this business is
to form great relationship with customers through fulfilment of their needs and demands. This
will positively influence honesty and loyalty of that customers towards company. Company
makes and focuses on the best staff planning in order to achieve determined goals of
organisation. It is important to understand needs and expectations of employees and people
because employees are the biggest asset for company and directly contributes to growing and
developing business. Staff planning of Arcadia company focus on retaining employees and
creates the best designs and workforce experiences for their employees. Staff planning help
company to meet their goals as they work in positive and healthy environment which help them
in concentrating on their task only (Lee, Huang and Chang, 2017).
Arcadia group Ltd has many departments like human resource, finance, marketing etc.
All functional departments have different goals. For example, marketing department's goal is to
attain all the necessary information in order to produce products and services demands by the
prospective buyers. Human resource department's objective is to hire the best employee and after
hiring provide and train them for effective and efficient work. Human resource department's goal
for this year is to retain the best employee within the company for achieving determined team
goals and reduce the labour turnover. Staff planning of the company help them in achieving
departmental goals as planning concentrate on identifying staffing and people needs and develop
a strong workforce culture (Noe and et.al., 2017).
Arcadia group Ltd is aiming to fill a vacant position of HR in the organisation. To
accomplish the same management determines the crucial skills and capabilities which are to be
fulfilled by the person. Skills that are required for HR executive that are: problem solving skills
and conflict management, multitasking, way of talking and effective communication, leading
ability. To fill the vacant position with an appropriate candidate, business have been taking help
of the internal and external sources of advertisement such as media advertisements, agencies,
word of mouth and recommendations.

There are some ways and things which need to consider for improving and making the best staff
planning such as:
Review the annual business plan of the company in order to make sure that it has enough
availability of the staff to cover all the projects.
Forecast future conditions and trends relating to the business so that needs of workforce
for the upcoming period can be determined.
Identify the issues related repeated understaffing in particular department.
To examine the current use of company's workforce and identify scope of improvement.
Overcome and resolve the problems related internal and external factors in order to meet
organisational goals.
There are some crucial factors that can affect a capability of Human resource department
to find and hire capable candidate for the business. The factors which affect organisational
staffing actions are Economical, financial, technological factors (Bi, Huang and Wang, 2016)..
Below is a detailed discussion of the factors:
Economic factors: Economic factors include changes in the demand, supply, price of the
products. Changes in cost, wages, labour majorly support them in finding talent for company's
departmental ability. For example, management may give limited budget to HR department for
hiring people on a specific position. Convincing right pool of talent in offered salary may not be
possible as potential employees would not agree to work at low wages. They may find more
money at another place and company can fail to hire right people in the organisation.
Technological factors: Some technological factors also impact company's operation. It
plays an important role in finding talent of existing employees. Response of workers regarding
adoption of new technology can determine their current ability. Changes in technologies and
using the new technologies by another competitive company impact in achieving the target
people as it increases the cost of company and increase the revenue.
Financial factors: Financial factors include fund and cash flow that company possess,
financial statement of company assist them in finding ability and talent of their workers. If
company's financial condition is not strong then it does not promote their business and give
advertisement for filling vacancies in the company.

Current employees of Arcadia group Ltd has some characteristic and skills like they have
good communication skills, ability to do research and development for marketing functions,
ability to build relationship with company. For achieving the departmental goals of the company,
it requires to hire at least 10 people within the company. It is hiring employees for post of HR
executive, sales executive, technicians and business associate. Future needs of department is to
improve their skills (Bakhuya, 2015).
CONCLUSION
From the above study it has been concluded that staff planning of the company played a
vital role in order to achieve all the objectives and goals of the company. It adopts and follows
the best way of making staff planning that help them to ensure that they have the best employees
with appropriate skills. Some factors like financial, economic and technological factors affect the
process of finding best and talented people for job. Different functional departments also play an
important role in the company as they all have different goals and objectives and work together
in order to meet team goals.
.
Illustration 1: Organisational chart
Sources: (Organisational Chart, 2018)

REFERENCES
Books and journals
Bakhuya, J. (2015). Effect of Communication Strategy on Strategic Planning in African Banking
Corporation Kenya(Doctoral dissertation, University of Nairobi).
Bi, K., Huang, P. and Wang, X. (2016). Innovation performance and influencing factors of low-
carbon technological innovation under the global value chain: A case of Chinese
manufacturing industry. Technological Forecasting and Social Change. 111. pp.275-
284.
Lee, C.Y., Huang, Y.C. and Chang, C.C. (2017). Factors influencing the alignment of
technological diversification and firm performance. Management Research
Review. 40(4). pp.451-470.
Nanlohy, H., Bambang, A.N. and Hutabarat, S.(2015). Coastal communities knowledge level on
climate change as a consideration in mangrove ecosystems management in the Kotania Bay,
West Seram Regency. Procedia Environmental Sciences. 23. pp.157-163.
Noe, R.A. and et.al. (2017). Human resource management: Gaining a competitive advantage.
New York, NY: McGraw-Hill Education.
Perez‐Estebanez, R., Urquía‐Grande, E. and Rautiainen, A. (2018). Technological and Economic
Factors Determining ICT Level: Evidence from Rural Micro‐Businesses in Democratic
Republic of Congo. Journal of International Development. 30(1). pp.118-133.