How to Do a Trend Analysis for Staffing

by Tracey Sandilands

A staffing trend analysis is a critical aspect of developing a work force planning strategy to meet the objectives of a company. Analyzing staff trends helps the business owner to identify issues affecting employee turnover, their impact on the company, the qualifications and experience of staff attracted to the firm, and measures required to ensure that the company’s future staffing needs are met.

Why Do It

The purposes of an analysis is to identify trends such as the levels of staffing needed to manage the workload, the structure of the organization, job satisfaction among employees. The trend analysis also studies the competencies of the current staff, the demographics of employees who are being drawn to the company, reasons why they join the company and reasons why they leave. A trend analysis also identifies the staff retention rate and the average years of service given by employees to the company.

Get Statistics

To do a staffing trend analysis, you need access to statistical data on the company’s employees, such as the number of employees, their length of service and rate of turnover. You should also collect data on each employee’s education and qualifications, prior work experience, family situation if available, and demographics. Obtain the same data for the previous year or two, to enable you to compare the current staffing situation with the former to establish the trends. Enter data such as the dates on which staff members resigned, and generate charts to highlight common trends across the groups.

Conduct Comparisons

Compare the employee data for two or three different periods of time, considering issues such as the number of staff members with more than one year’s service in the current year versus the same group in the previous year. Add the details of increases in compensation, ongoing education and reporting lines, to understand whether those who remained had issues in common with those who left. If possible, use trend analysis software to identify the information you need and to generate a scientific report once it completes the analysis.

Take Account of Disadvantages

Statistical analysis remains open to human interpretation and can influence staff trends by skewed reading. In addition, the analytical process provides information on which to base assumptions, but the nature of human existence is that often those assumptions are not completely fact-based, and can be subject to natural events such as births, deaths, marriages and divorces. These life events cause potential fluctuations in the accuracy of the data that are called “random error” because they are not fully predictable, and allowance must be made for that error in the final analysis.

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