Human resource planning

 

Human resources planning

 

It is the backbone of human resources management and development. It may be defined as an articulated business strategy based on current and future business forecast for the acquisition, utilization, development, and retention of an enterprise’s human resources. The strategy articulates the need as it exists today and the plan necessitates formulation of the goals and action plan for achievement of the people plan. The process facilitates hiring and retaining the right profile of people at varying jobs, positions, places and time frames depending on the organizational need.

 

Hr planning: purpose and goals

The purpose and goals of HR planning are mainly:

·        To ensure optimum and effective use of human resources currently employed;

·      To research and reconfigure new skill sets to cope with organizational needs given depleting relevant skills population

·        To assess the employability of the human resource given changing skills and competencies

·        To draw specific outlines of competencies as they differ from today

·        To assess or forecast future skills requirement if organization’s overall objectives are to be achieved; and

·        To identify control standards to ensure that necessary resources are identified, available as and when required.

·        To fundamentally study the corporate strategy, the business mission and overall philosophy of recruiting technology and outsourcing.

 

Strategic advantages for HR Planning

There are a number of more specific reasons for resorting to HR planning exercises at the level of the undertaking, reasons that can make the exercise essential. These are:

·        To establish the best cost balance between plant and manpower utilization.

·        To determine recruitment, level wise and occupation wise

·        Ensure that we do not inherit surplus manpower hired on account of an incompetent CEO.

·        To ensure that people do not substitute systems and process

·        To anticipate redundancies and avoid unnecessary dismissals or aspirations

·        To decide optimum training levels.

·        To decide on worker training courses

·        To provide a basis for management development programs

 

Steps In Human Resource Planning

 1.Analyse Organizational Strategy

Any successful workforce-management program — including human resource planning — is a direct offshoot of your business’s organizational strategy.

Therefore, you should always start your HRP process by analyzing the goals and plans of your organization. With those strategies in mind, you can then move on to crafting a general human resources mission statement.

From there, you can work your way through the various departments in your business to address issues such as:

·        Benefits

·        Recruitment

• Employee relations
• Retirement

When you have that information written down, you can craft a human resource plan to help your business reach and maintain its goals.

 

2) Inventory Current Human Resources

After analyzing your organizational strategy, it’s time to take stock of your business’s current human resources.

In the process, it’s beneficial to investigate such variables as:

·        Total number of team members you employ

·        Who works in what department

·        Skills of each employee

·        Performance reviews

·        Team and individual potential

With that data in hand, you then make sure that your existing workforce is large enough and skilled enough to cover current demands before moving on to the next step in this guide.

 

3) Forecast The Future Of Your Workforce

Step three is all about planning, prediction, and preparing for the future.

Guided by your organizational strategy and your current employee data, do your best to forecast what the future of your workforce will look like. Be sure to incorporate any goals and plans into your forecast.

Examine variables such as:

·        Expansion

·        New product offerings

·        New services

·        A second (or third) location

·        Labor costs

·        Vendor and supplier relations

·        Cost of goods sold

·        Inventory

A forecast of this type, coupled with the workforce data from step two, gives you an accurate picture of where your business is right now and where you want it to be five, 10, even 15 years down the road.

 

4) Estimate Gaps

Armed with the information you’ve produced so far, you can now estimate whether or not there are any gaps in your human resource strategy.

Will you need more employees to get your business from the present to where you want it to be in the future? If so, how many? Will you need fewer employees? If so, how many?

Does your forecast call for a reallocation or redistribution of current team members? If so, how would you go about doing this?

Once you’ve estimated the gaps between your current and future workforce numbers, you can move on to step five, where all the planning and brainstorming comes to fruition.

 

5) Formulate An Action Plan

Formulating an action plan is where the rubber meets the road, so to speak.

Your action plan should take into account all the analysis that came before it — organizational strategies, current HR inventory, HR forecast, and gaps between present and future — to create a step-by-step system for taking your business from point A to point B.

The action plan will be different for every business. Some businesses may need to begin recruiting and training. Other businesses may need to promote or transition their existing workforce.

Still other businesses may need to develop a retirement program or a redeployment process to deal with surplus employees.

When crafting your plan, start with the theoretical — evolve from X to Y — and then move on to actionable steps that your HR department can take — hire and retain two new team members every year, for example — to transform the theory into reality.

With these steps in mind, you can implement a successful human resource planning system into your business, no matter how many employees you have.

As you go about implementing your business’s HRP, don’t neglect the foundation of all good employer/employee relations: scheduling and communication. We’ll discuss this topic at the end of the article.

 

6) Integrate With The Rest Of The Company

Now that you’ve got an action plan, your human resource planning efforts will start to yield results.

That said, the integration stage is the most difficult of the entire process, so be ready for some speed bumps.

Without proper preparation — and even with proper preparation, in some cases — both management and frontline employees may show resistance to the proposed changes.

In addition, all departments within your business work together in one way or another (even if it doesn’t at first appear so). This makes the integration phase challenging on many levels.

One of the best ways to integrate human resource planning into the rest of the company is to start with the recruitment, hiring, and training practices in your business.

Once you’ve brought in new, high-potential employees and have begun funneling them into the various departments, you can start to make other changes to accommodate these new hires.

Integrating slowly and pairing the changes with new employees who will further the goals and productivity of each department makes putting your new human resource planning into place much easier.

 

7) Monitor, Evaluate, And Adjust

The final step in human resource planning is to monitor the new practices, evaluate them for their effectiveness, and adjust as necessary.

In addition to monitoring each department and your business as a whole, it’s also beneficial to zoom in on how any changes made affect the individual employee.

To take the pulse of the front-line worker, include questions about your human resource planning during mid-year reviews and performance appraisals. You can even ask for their opinion when you have them complete an employee self-evaluation.

Monitoring and evaluating in this way will help you get a detailed view of how any new policies, procedures, and practices affect the men and women in the trenches.

Once you have all the information you need, you can then take steps to adjust your human resource planning accordingly.

For that, it’s best to return to the top of this list and start again at step one, incorporating what you learned from the previous run-through.

In essence, then, you can view this list as less of a straight line and more of a circle, with step seven leading directly back into step one. As such, your HRP should be in a constant state of development.

 Conclusion:

Finally HR planning is continuous, ongoing process; and companies that treat it as a five-year burdensome task will be deeply disappointed. In fact it is preferable that they do start this task as it may turn into a ritual. Even the most carefully calculated forecasts are liable to be overtaken by unforeseeable changes. A system of assorting plans to these changes with as little delay as possible, is an essential part of manpower planning. Indeed one might say that it is the essential characteristic of a well-managed enterprise.