Operations teams have to make a surprising number of hires to keep pace with a growing org

hires in the next 12 months

Replacing staff who leave the org Replacing moves to other teams Keeping up with org growth Catch-up growth Replacing hires that didn't work out

The assumptions

Org growth rate

Annual growth of the organisation, ideally measured in staff.

Looks like you're modelling high growth. The operations load of high-growth orgs is particularly high — explore the effects with this tool.

Org size

Total staff today, including the ops team.

Ops team size

How many of those staff sit on the operations team today.

Your operations team is currently of the org.

Operations team turnover

Operations staff leaving the organisation

Annual expected turnover.

Operations staff moving to other teams

Annual rate of ops staff who leave to go to other teams — a loss to the ops team, often a win for the org.

New hires who don't work out

Share of the next 12 months' hires that don't work out, so the seat gets hired for again. Careful not to double count: the "staff leaving the organisation" dial (20% by default) may already include some of these people — if it does, shave one of the two down.

What share of organisation staff should the operations team be?

Under capacity? Set it above today's share and hire to catch up (you might need to stay there a while to work through systems debt).
Okay where you are? Set it to today's share.
Over capacity? Set it below today's and let org demands catch up.
The maths accounts for the new ops staff themselves adding to org size — which is why catching up takes more hires than you'd naively think.

How quickly do you want to get there?

Run it forward five years

Headcount compounds with growth; the hiring load compounds with it. Fractional hires are shown as-is — in practice they arrive lumpy. (With steady rates, hires as a % of the team stays constant year to year — that column only moves while the target share is changing.)

Year	Org at start	Ops at start	Hires needed	As % of team	Ops share at year end	Cumulative hires

Caveats: the model assumes operations demands scale linearly with org size, treats the rates as independent and stable, and assumes service delivery just holds its progress. It also ignores that the faster an org grows, the heavier the operations load per staff member — this companion tool explores that effect.