What is Human Resource Planning and why is important for your business
"Human resource planning is the process by which human resource needs of an organization are linked to the strategic plan to ensure that staff is sufficient, qualified, and competent enough to achieve the organization’s objectives."
Human resource planning is vital for organizations in that it assists in maintaining competitive advantage while reducing employee turnover. The process of human resource planning also takes into account people enabling, development and focus on making work relationship fulfilling for the management and employees.
Basically human resource planning is resource centered through deployment, planning, monitoring and control of staff.
Human resource planning involves four steps:
1. Current Human Resource Supply: An organization must assess her current human resource availability by conducting a comprehensive study of her human resource strength. The study involves numbers, skills, talents, performances, and ages among others. An organization’s human resource may conduct interviews with managers to establish critical areas.
2. Future Human Resource Demand: In human resource, there are known variables like lay-offs, retirements, promotions, and transfers among others. Human resource planning requires that an organization determines her future human resource demands.
3. Forecasting on the Human Resource Demand: At this stage a company needs to establish her current supply of employees and the expected demand in future. Business strategies and goals help in determining workforce demand.
4. Human Resource Sourcing Strategy and Implementation: Once a company reviews the gaps in her human resource supply and demand, the organization develops plans to meet these gaps by considering demand forecast. This can be done through conducting communication programs with workers.
Processes in Human Resource Planning
All organizations works towards realization of their vision. The realization of these visions can only be made possible by strategizing on staff formulations and executions.
The process of planning begins with recruitment whereby a company attracts applicants that match certain job criteria. This is followed by selection whereby candidates with nearest qualifications gets shortlisted. Hiring follows shortlisting whereby the company decides who gets the job. After hiring the employee gets trained and developed to upgrade abilities and improve on skills.
Employee Remuneration and Benefits Administration: The process is based upon deciding the salary, wages, incentives, fringe benefits among others.
Every employee works for money and other benefits deserved. Good salaries and benefits are major motivators to performing employees. When employees perform well they seek raises and bonuses. Raises may also be as a result of changes and increased living standards.
Performance Management of Employees: This aims at assisting organization train, motivate and reward employees. In the long run the performance management helps the organization realize her goals. The process focuses on both employees, department, product, service and customer process. By use of automated performance management systems, mangers can easily evaluate performance of workers. Therefore they can assess training and development needs per worker.
Employee Relations: Retention of workers may be hard to most organizations especially those in competitive industries. There are so many reasons that may lead to an employee stick to or leave an organization, few of these factors are under the control of human resource and planning. Employee relations caters for all factors starting from Labor Law relations, working environment, employee health and safe employee-employee conflict management. Also workers compensation, their wellness and counselling for those workers that are stressed occupationally helps retaining workers. These processes of human resource planning works better with conformity and cohesiveness of survival and success.