Human resource planning is the responsibility of all managers. It focuses on the demand and supply of labour and involves the acquisition, development and departure of people. This is recognised as a vital HR function as the success of an organisation depends on its employees.
The purpose of HR planning is to ensure that a predetermined number of persons with the correct skills are available at a specified time in the future. Thus, HR planning systematically identifies what must be done to guarantee the availability of the human resources needed by an organisation to meet its strategic business objectives. To achieve this HR planning cannot be undertaken in isolation. It must be linked to the organisation’s overall business strategy, and concentrate on the organisation’s long-range human resource requirements.
Read More: Introduction to Human Resource Planning
Process of Human Resource Planning
1. Analysing the Corporate Level Strategies: – Human Resource Planning should start with analysing corporate level strategies which include expansion, diversification, mergers, acquisitions, reduction in operations, technology to be used, method of production etc. Therefore Human Resource Planning should begin with analysing the corporate plans of the organisation before setting out on fulfilling its tasks.
2. Demand forecasting: – Forecasting the overall human resource requirement in accordance with the organisational plans is one of the key aspects of demand forecasting. Forecasting of quality of human resources like skills, knowledge, values and capabilities needed in addition to quantity of human resources is done through the following methods: -
a. Executive or Managerial Judgement: – Here the managers decide the number of employees in the future. They adopt one of the three approaches mentioned below: -
- Bottom-Up approach: – Here the concerned supervisors send their proposals to the top officials who compare these with the organisational plans, make necessary adjustments and finalise them.
- Top-Down approach: – Here the management prepares the requirements and sends the information downwards to the supervisory –level who finalises the draft and approves it.
- Participative Approach: – Here the supervisors and the management sit together and projections are made after joint consultations.
Drawbacks
- The chief drawback of these methods is that estimation of manpower is made using guesswork.
b. Statistical Techniques: – These methods use statistical methods and mathematical techniques to forecast and predict the supply and demand of Human Resources in the future.
- Ratio-Trend analysis: – In this method depending on the past data regarding number of employees in each department, like production department, sales department, marketing department and workload level, etc ratios for manpower are estimated. Past values are plotted and extrapolated to get fairly accurate future projections.
c. Work Study method: – This technique is suitable to study the correlation between volume of work and labour i.e. demand for human resources is estimated based on the workload. Work study method is more appropriate for repetitive and manual jobs when it is possible to measure work and set standards.
d. Delphi Technique: – ‘Delphi’ Technique is named after the Greek Oracle at the city of Delphi. In this method, the views of different experts related to the industry are taken into consideration and then a consensus about the Human Resource requirement is arrived at. Delphi technique is used primarily to assess long-term needs of human resource.
3. Analysing Human Resource Supply: – Every organisation has two sources of supply of Human Resources: Internal & External. Internally, human resources can be obtained for certain posts through promotions and transfers. In order to judge the internal supply of human resources in future human resource inventory or human resource audit is necessary. Human resource inventory helps in determining and evaluating the quantity of internal human resources available. Once the future internal supply is estimated, supply of external human resources is analysed.
4. Estimating manpower gaps: – Manpower gaps can be identified by comparing demand and supply forecasts. Such comparison will reveal either deficit or surplus of Human Resources in the future. Deficit suggests the number of persons to be recruited from outside, whereas surplus implies redundant employees to be re-deployed or terminated. Employees estimated to be deficient can be trained while employees with higher, better skills may be given more enriched jobs.
5. Action Planning: – Once the manpower gaps are identified, plans are prepared to bridge these gaps. Plans to meet the surplus manpower may be redeployment in other departments and retrenchment. People may be persuaded to quit voluntarily through a golden handshake. Deficit can be met through recruitment, selection, transfer and promotion. In view of shortage of certain skilled employees, the organisation has to take care not only of recruitment but also retention of existing employees. Hence, the organisation has to plan for retaining of existing employees.
6. Modify the Organisational plans: – If future supply of human resources form all the external sources is estimated to be inadequate or less than the requirement, the manpower planner has to suggest to the management regarding the alterations or modifications in the organisational plans.
7. Controlling and Review: – After the action plans are implemented, human resource structure and the processes should be controlled and reviewed with a view to keep them in accordance with action plans.
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