What is human resource planning? The human resource management process ensures quality employees are the backbone of any organization. Human resource planning (HRP) is a much-needed tool for the maintenance and improvement of quality administration. This is the continuous process of systematic planning ahead to achieve optimum use of an organization’s most valuable asset.
Significantly, human resource planning (HRP) is a strategy used by organizations to maintain a steady stream of skilled employees (ensuring the best fit between employees and jobs). It is also important in avoiding employee shortages or surpluses.
Further, the process has four key steps. These include, “analyzing present labor supply, forecasting labor demand, balancing projected labor demand with supply, and supporting public organizational goals”. Productivity and profitability are the main aims of any organization. Investing in proper HRP is ideal for any company that wants to achieve this.
The 4 Human Resource Planning Process Steps
Let’s take each step in sequence in order to arrive at the end goal. The goal is to develop a strategy that enables the company to successfully find and retain enough qualified employees to meet the company’s needs.
Analyzing Labor Supply
This is where the HR personel has to look at what the organization already has in terms of employees (Human Resources). In this first step they look at aspects like the workforce’s skills, qualifications, positions, benefits, and performance levels. Objectivity for the benefit of the company is essential during this step.
Forecasting Labor Demand
As the name suggests, this second step is about looking into the future and projecting how much labor the company may need in a specified period of time. This is an outline of the future of a company’s workforce.
Here, the HR department can consider issues like promotions, retirements, layoffs, and transfers—anything that factors into the future needs of a company. The HR department can also look at external conditions impacting labor demand, such as new technology that might increase or decrease the need for workers.
1.Balancing Labor Demand With Supply
The third step responds to the present and possible needs. As a result, the HR department carries out a gap analysis that lays out specific needs to narrow the supply of the company’s labor versus future demand. This analysis will often generate a series of questions, such as:
Should employees learn new skills?
Does the company need more managers?
Do all employees play to their strengths in their current roles?
2. Developing and Implementing a Plan
The answers to questions from the gap analysis help HR determine how to proceed, which is the final phase of the HRP process. HR must now take practical steps to integrate its plan with the rest of the company. The department needs a budget, the ability to implement the plan, and a collaborative effort with all departments to execute that plan.
Human resource planning is important in ensuring competence within the workforce and ultimately feeding into the company’s communication leading to productivity profitability. Another name for this is workforce planning. The process is also used to help companies evaluate their needs and to plan ahead to meet those needs of public administration. Human resource planning needs to be flexible enough to meet short-term staffing challenges while adapting to changing conditions in the business environment over the longer term. HRP starts by assessing and auditing the current capacity of human resources.
3. Challenges
The challenges to HRP include forces that are always changing. This includes employees getting sick, getting promoted, or going on vacation. HRP also ensures there is the best fit between workers and jobs, avoiding shortages and surpluses in the employee pool.
4. To satisfy employee objectives
HR managers make plans to do the following: find and attract skilled employees, select, train, and reward the best candidates. They also cope with absences and deal with conflicts. Furthermore, they promote employees or let some of them go.