Why human resource planning is necessary?

We address such questions as:
• What is human resource planning?
• How do organizations undertake this sort of exercise?
• What specific uses does it have?

1. Determining the numbers to be employed at a new location

If organizations overdo the size of their workforce it will carry surplus or underutilized staff. Alternatively, if the opposite misjudgment is made, staff may be overstretched, making it hard or impossible to meet production or service deadlines at the quality level expected. So the questions we ask are:
• How can output be improved your through understanding the interrelation between productivity, work organization and technological development? What does this mean for staff numbers?
• What techniques can be used to establish workforce requirements?
• Have more flexible work arrangements been considered?
• How are the staffs you need to be acquired?
The principles can be applied to any exercise to define workforce requirements, whether it be a business start-up, a relocation, or the opening of new factory or office.

2. Retaining your highly skilled staff

Issues about retention may not have been to the fore in recent years, but all it needs is for organizations to lose key staff to realize that an understanding of the pattern of resignation is needed. Thus organizations should:
• monitor the extent of resignation
• discover the reasons for it
• establish what it is costing the organization
• Compare loss rates with other similar organizations.
Without this understanding, management may be unaware of how many good quality staff is being lost. This will cost the organization directly through the bill for separation, recruitment and induction, but also through a loss of long-term capability.
Having understood the nature and extent of resignation steps can be taken to rectify the situation. These may be relatively cheap and simple solutions once the reasons for the departure of employees have been identified. But it will depend on whether the problem is peculiar to your own organization, and whether it is concentrated in particular groups (e.g. by age, gender, grade or skill).

3. Managing an effective downsizing programmer

This is an all too common issue for managers. How is the workforce to be cut painlessly, while at the same time protecting the long-term interests of the organization? A question made all the harder by the time pressures management is under, both because of business necessities and employee anxieties. HRP helps by considering:
• The sort of workforce envisaged at the end of the exercise
• The pros and cons of the different routes to get there
• How the nature and extent of wastage will change during the run-down
• The utility of retraining, redeployment and transfers
• What the appropriate recruitment levels might be.
Such an analysis can be presented to senior managers so that the cost benefit of various methods of reduction can be assessed, and the time taken to meet targets established.

4. Where will the next generation of managers come from?

Many senior managers are troubled by this issue. They have seen traditional career paths disappear. They have had to bring in senior staff from elsewhere. But they recognize that while this may have dealt with a short-term skills shortage, it has not solved the longer term question of managerial supply: what sort, how many, and where will they come from? To address these questions you need to understand:
• The present career system (including patterns of promotion and movement, of recruitment and wastage)
• The characteristics of those who currently occupy senior positions
• The organization’s future supply of talent.

Human Resource Management importance:

• Human Resource Management is a strategic function.
• Investments in people must be related to organizational strategy.
• There must be a measurable return for every HR initiative.
• For example, most effort should be made to develop those employees with potential to add most value to the organization.
• Many approaches to HR in the past have regarded people a bit mechanistically - as resources, parts of a machine.
• As more leadership and entrepreneurial action is demanded of all employees, the more HR must play an enabling role rather than a controlling one.
• HR professionals can best show leadership by championing new initiatives to help their organizations make better use of its talent. HR professionals can be leaders, not just suppliers of services.
The most critical role for HR today is to foster talent management. In a knowledge driven age, business is a war of ideas, so it is all about the people, more than ever