HRM Workforce Planing

Workforce Planning

Strategic Workforce Planning is the business process for ensuring that an organization has suitable access to talent to ensure future business success. Access to talent includes considering all potential access sources (employment, contracting out, partnerships, changing business activities to modify the types of talent required, etc. By talent is meant the skills, knowledge, predisposition and ability to undertake required activities including decisions making. Strategic Planning considers the business risks concerning insufficient, disrupted, mis-deployed talent on the organization's business priorities. Strategic Workforce Planning is analogous to the treasurer role which is concerned with ensuring the organization has suitable access to working capital. This role also looks at multiple sources for access and similar risks to those mentioned above. One of the more restrictive and potentially dangerous assumptions is that Strategic Planning is only about talent in the form of employees. Hiring is a strategy for accessing talent and will often be the superior one. However, the use of employees to meet talent needs carries with it unique risks that can be mitigated using alternative access sourcing arrangements. Regardless of the access source used, insightful assessment of the strategy's attendant business risk is prudent.
Succession Planning is a subset of Strategic Workforce Planning in that it considers two talent business risk event areas usually in executive roles. First, the sudden loss of an incumbent (illness, resignation, etc.). Second, to meet longer term anticipated turnover by having a "pool" or "designate" ready, willing and able to fill the vacated role. Succession Planning has had a checkered history in business for several reasons. First, holds a static view of the world, it looks at future needs (the second risk above). Unfortunately, necessary roles evolve and change over time, hence the pool or designate can be come deficient in some critical talent area or other. Another issue is when the designate approach is taken - this can establish morale and performance issues that unnecessarily feed the organization's politics. Also, it is quite common that when a role is vacated, the organization wants to test the broader market place for talent and often shows a preference for external hires. If this happens frequently enough it too can lead to disruptive effects within the organization. On balance, Succession Planning can be very effective as a "contingent" plan when a vacancy appears. This provides the organization time to think through its longer term needs.
The process for starting out Strategic Workforce Planning is link with the organization's strategy. This means identifying the critical talent needs that if not met can materially adversely impact business success. Once the business risks are fully appreciated then attention turns to schedule and timing. Assessing current internal capability and assessing its relative position when it will be called upon in the future. Speculating on future sourcing options and identifying the preferred sourcing option. Implementation and execution follow. Attention to periodically reviewing the "sanity" of the current plan is prudent. One area that seems to receive little attention is the issue of metrics that support Strategic Workforce Planning. To the degree an organization can identify and establish relevant leading indicators can provide significant benefits - the benefits arising out of lead time. Having lead time, always provides additional options in action, a surprise, typically diminishes options. There is a cost to having lead time and this is balanced against the value of having additional options on the table. As a general rule, an effective leading indicator does not tell you what the future will be, it suggests that is more likely to be. Hence one of the early actions arising out of a leading indicator flag is to undertake closer investigation to size up the likelihood of the possible event.

HRM Human Resources Management

Human resource management (HRM) is the strategic and coherent approach to the management of an organisation's most valued assets - the people working there who individually and collectively contribute to the achievement of the objectives of the business.[1] The terms "human resource management" and "human resources" (HR) have largely replaced the term "personnel management" as a description of the processes involved in managing people in organizations.[1] In simple sense, HRM means employing people, developing their resources, utilizing, maintaining and compensating their services in tune with the job and organizational requirement.

Features
Its features include:
• Organizational management
• Personnel administration
• Personnel management
• Manpower management
• Industrial management[2][3]
But these traditional expressions are becoming less common for the theoretical discipline. Sometimes even industrial relations and employee relations are confusingly listed as synonyms,[4] although these normally refer to the relationship between management and workers and the behavior of workers in companies. The theoretical discipline is based primarily on the assumption that employees are individuals with varying goals and needs, and as such should not be thought of as basic business resources, such as trucks and filing cabinets. The field takes a positive view of workers, assuming that virtually all wish to contribute to the enterprise productively, and that the main obstacles to their endeavors are lack of knowledge, insufficient training, and failures of process.
HRM is seen by practitioners in the field as a more innovative view of workplace management than the traditional approach. Its techniques force the managers of an enterprise to express their goals with specificity so that they can be understood and undertaken by the workforce, and to provide the resources needed for them to successfully accomplish their assignments. As such, HRM techniques, when properly practiced, are expressive of the goals and operating practices of the enterprise overall. HRM is also seen by many to have a key role in risk reduction within organizations.[5] Synonyms such as personnel management are often used in a more restricted sense to describe activities that are necessary in the recruiting of a workforce, providing its members with payroll and benefits, and administrating their work-life needs. So if we move to actual definitions, Torrington and Hall (1987) define personnel management as being:
“a series of activities which: first enable working people and their employing organisations to agree about the objectives and nature of their working relationship and, secondly, ensures that the agreement is fulfilled" (p. 49).
While Miller (1987) suggests that HRM relates to:
".......those decisions and actions which concern the management of employees at all levels in the business and which are related to the implementation of strategies directed towards creating and sustaining competitive advantage" (p. 352).

Academic theory
The goal of human resource management is to help an organization to meet strategic goals by attracting, and maintaining employees and also to manage them effectively. The key word here perhaps is "fit", i.e. a HRM approach seeks to ensure a fit between the management of an organization's employees, and the overall strategic direction of the company (Miller, 1989). The basic premise of the academic theory of HRM is that humans are not machines, therefore we need to have an interdisciplinary examination of people in the workplace. Fields such as psychology, industrial engineering, industrial, Legal/Paralegal Studies and organizational psychology, industrial relations, sociology, and critical theories: postmodernism, post-structuralism play a major role. Many colleges and universities offer bachelor and master degrees in Human Resources Management. One widely used scheme to describe the role of HRM, developed by Dave Ulrich, defines 4 fields for the HRM function:[6]
• Strategic business partner
• Change management
• Employee champion
• Administration
However, many HR functions these days struggle to get beyond the roles of administration and employee champion, and are seen rather as reactive than strategically proactive partners for the top management. In addition, HR organizations also have the difficulty in proving how their activities and processes add value to the company. Only in the recent years HR scholars and HR professionals are focusing to develop models that can measure if HR adds value.[7]

Critical Academic Theory
Postmodernism plays an important part in Academic Theory and particularly in Critical Theory. Indeed Karen Legge in 'Human Resource Management: Rhetorics and Realities' poses the debate of whether HRM is a modernist project or a postmodern discourse (Legge 2004). In many ways, critically or not, many writers contend that HRM itself is an attempt to move away from the modernist traditions of personnel (man as machine) towards a postmodernist view of HRM (man as individuals). Critiques include the notion that because 'Human' is the subject we should recognize that people are complex and that it is only through various discourses that we understand the world. Man is not Machine, no matter what attempts are made to change it i.e. Fordism / Taylorism, McDonaldisation (Modernism). Critical Theory also questions whether HRM is the pursuit of "attitudinal shaping" (Wilkinson 1998), particularly when considering empowerment, or perhaps more precisely pseudo-empowerment - as the critical perspective notes. Many critics note the move away from Man as Machine is often in many ways, more a Linguistic (discursive) move away than a real attempt to recognise the Human in Human Resource Management. Critical Theory, in particular postmodernism (poststructualism), recognises that because the subject is people in the workplace, the subject is a complex one, and therefore simplistic notions of 'the best way' or a unitary perspectives on the subject are too simplistic. It also considers the complex subject of power, power games, and office politics. Power in the workplace is a vast and complex subject that cannot be easily defined. This leaves many critics to suggest that Management 'Gurus', consultants, 'best practice' and HR models are often overly simplistic, but in order to sell an idea, they are simplified, and often lead Management as a whole to fall into the trap of oversimplifying the relationship.

Business practice
Human resources management comprises several processes. Together they are supposed to achieve the above mentioned goal. These processes can be performed in an HR department, but some tasks can also be outsourced or performed by line-managers or other departments. When effectively integrated they provide significant economic benefit to the company.[8]
• Workforce planning
• Recruitment (sometimes separated into attraction and selection)
• Induction and Orientation
• Skills management
• Training and development
• Personnel administration
• Compensation in wage or salary
• Time management
• Travel management (sometimes assigned to accounting rather than HRM)
• Payroll (sometimes assigned to accounting rather than HRM)
• Employee benefits administration
• Personnel cost planning
• Performance appraisal

Careers
The sort of careers available in HRM are varied. There are generalist HRM jobs such as human resource assistant. There are careers involved with employment, recruitment and placement and these are usually conducted by interviewers, EEO (Equal Employment Opportunity) specialists or college recruiters. Training and development specialism is often conducted by trainers and orientation specialists. Compensation and benefits tasks are handled by compensation analysts, salary administrators, and benefits administrators.

Professional organizations
Professional organizations in HRM include the Society for Human Resource Management, the Australian Human Resources Institute (AHRI), the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development (CIPD), the International Public Management Association for HR (IPMA-HR), Management Association of Nepal MAN and the International Personnel Management Association of Canada (IPMA-Canada), Human Capital Institute (HCI)

Functions
The Human Resources Management (HRM) function includes a variety of activities, and key among them is deciding what staffing needs you have and whether to use independent contractors or hire employees to fill these needs, recruiting and training the best employees, ensuring they are high performers, dealing with performance issues, and ensuring your personnel and management practices conform to various regulations. Activities also include managing your approach to employee benefits and compensation, employee records and personnel policies. Usually small businesses (for-profit or nonprofit) have to carry out these activities themselves because they can't yet afford part- or full-time help. However, they should always ensure that employees have -- and are aware of -- personnel policies which conform to current regulations. These policies are often in the form of employee manuals, which all employees have.
Note that some people distinguish a difference between between HRM (a major management activity) and HRD (Human Resource Development, a profession). Those people might include HRM in HRD, explaining that HRD includes the broader range of activities to develop personnel inside of organizations, including, eg, career development, training, organization development, etc. There is a long-standing argument about where HR-related functions should be organized into large organizations, eg, "should HR be in the Organization Development department or the other way around?" The HRM function and HRD profession have undergone tremendous change over the past 20-30 years. Many years ago, large organizations looked to the "Personnel Department," mostly to manage the paperwork around hiring and paying people. More recently, organizations consider the "HR Department" as playing a major role in staffing, training and helping to manage people so that people and the organization are performing at maximum capability in a highly fulfilling manner.