The Total theme has a custom field added to the user edit screen that allows you to connect a staff member to that specific user. This is an exclusive theme feature.
When linking a user to a staff member to a user any posts created by that user that display author data will pull the data from the staff member instead of the user itself. For example if your post template has an author bio section, instead of displaying the information for the post author it will pull the name, description and social links from the staff member assigned to the post author.
Assign Staff Members as Author Plugin
We’ve released a plugin on the WordPress repository which you can use to easily assign any post author to a specific staff member in order to display the staff member as the author of the article in both the meta and author bio sections.
This plugin is intended if you do NOT want to add users and connect them to your staff as shown above, this plugin is for assigning posts to staff members without having to also add extra users. So basically it’s intended for running a site as an admin and publishing posts for your staff members and then assigning them. If you are going to have users for each staff member, then you don’t really need this plugin, it will just add extra work for you.