Free «Human Resource Assignment» Essay Sample

Introduction

Any business entity should be able to predict and evaluate all of existing scarce resources including human resources in order to keep competitive advantage and ensure sustainability of the business. In many ways, the management should take long-term perspective in human resource strategy.  As a part of resourcing process, human resource planning possesses a crucial role among other elements of human resource management model, such as organization, human resources development, reward management, and employee relations. This paper will discuss human resource planning contribution to effective human resource management with the outlining Armstrong’s model of HR planning.

Definition of Human Resource Management (HRM)

Human resource management is a process of strategic management of human resources investing their best skills and deepest knowledge to achieve the company’s goals (Armstrong, 2006). Human resource management has the following goals:

-         integrate human resource strategies with the common business strategy;

-         invest in high-performance culture;

-         provide the organization with needed number of employees with appropriate skills and experience within requested period;

-         empower ethical and equal behavior within the organization.

Definition Of Human Resource Planning

Successful human resource planning is a process involving the company’s ability to meet the following challenges:

-         how many staff members, which skills, where and when required;

-         how to reduce or optimize the use of surplus staff and attract the right employees;

-         how best to involve employees according to their abilities, skills and internal motivation;

-         how to ensure the conditions for the development of human resources (Snell & Bohlander 2010).

    Armstrong Model

According to Armstrong (2006), human resource planning aims to achieve the following goals:

-         “to attract and retain the number of people required with the appropriate skills, expertise and competences” (p.368);

-         predict and provide the balance between supply and demand of human resources;

-         ensure the development of employees, the improvement of their flexibility with the aim of being prepared to face the challenging circumstances of a changing environment;

-         support retaining strategies with the aim of being less dependent on outsourcing skilled and experienced workforce;

-            “improve the utilization of people by introducing more flexible systems of work” (p.45).

Armstrong’s model differs from the traditional view of human resource planning and underlines the perception of the employee as the most important value for the company. He points out that the human resource planning includes the following stages:

-         business strategy plan creating;

-         scenario planning, demand and supply forecasting, turnover analysis;

-         work and operational effectiveness analysis with the following creation of human resource plan;

-         evaluating and implementing the strategies of resourcing, retention, flexibility and productivity (p.370).

Armstrong further states that future human resource requirements are evaluated on the basis of demand forecasting techniques; managerial judgement; ratio trend analysis; work study techniques; supply and competence requirements techniques. Human resources planning must be linked to operational part of business closely, which is essential for the implementation of forward-looking goals.

Discussion

I strongly agree with the main thesis of the Armstrong’s model that the employee is the best value that the company has and he adds the aditional value to the company’s wealth. My personal view is that his model is more applicable to current economic conditions comparing to traditional one. Skilled and highly competent human resources is a result of maximal efforts made by the company in terms of effective planning, development, support, evaluation and promotion of its employees.

Another significant point is that human resource planning includes four components, such as recruitment, retention, redeployment and removal (Turner, 2002). The following goals that any organization wants to achieve when implementing a system of efficient human resource planning are pointed out:

-         efficient resourcing that can provide equilibrium of needed skills and established positions within the company;

-         an environment in which employees are interested in achieving established goals knowing that they will be highly rewarded and recognized;

-         employee relations are equitable and well-managed;

-         each employee has equal access to training and developmental programs that ensure inflow of innovations.

I fully agree with the position of Jackson, Schuler and Werner (2012), who underline that the process of human resource management, and particularly human resource planning as its crucial part, is involved with managing teams, multicultural workforce, globalization, ethic and corporate social responsibility.

I believe that such position expressed by Beardwell and Claydon (2007) regarding human resource planning process as “investigation and analysis, forecasting demand and supply, developing action plans to address any imbalance, implementing the plans and evaluating their effectiveness” (p.186) is limited because it does not take into account the concept of human resources growth inside a company and leadership development. 

But I agree with their argument that the main advantage of human resource planning lies in decreasing the level of uncertainty, changing the workforce characteristics and environment to flexible one and being able “to contribute to vertical and horizontal integration” (p.186). Difficulty and complexity of full data obtaining, high level of predictive thinking needed are the main disadvantages of the human resource planning process. Human resource planning includes making an analysis based on the data of available positions, as well as their structure and requirements in the period ahead.

I consider three Cs (capabilities, composition, and culture) pointed by Snell and Bohlander (2010) are necessary for internal analysis of human resource planning process. Moreover it is crucial to understand that “people are a key resource that underlies a firm’s core capabilities” (p.53).

I am convinced that human resource planning is not only the challenging task of predicting, evaluating, qualitative and quantitative analysis, but also a new way of estimating a company’s image and assets. According to Turner (2002) as a coherent approach, human resource planning implies involvement of:

-  specialists of the human resource department, thus providing the sufficient basis for the employees turnover and development evaluating;

-  “field players”, that is managers and executives, who feel and see the gaps in the development and state of subordinated groups’ personnel, and can make a unique estimation of the existing situation. Turner emphasizes the importance of continual improvement in the form of frequent experiments, revision and rethinking of human resources planning actions and thinking process.

Conclusion

To summarize the above mentioned I would like to point that human resource planning is one of the most important elements of human resource management, because it provides quantitative, qualitative, temporal and spatial determination of human resource requirements needed to achieve organizational goals. In terms of performance and motivation, employees must do their best, i.e. develop skills, improve efficiency, and meet the requirements of overall company’s business strategy.

Human resource planning is carried out in three stages, such as:

-         forecasting human resource requirements gathering information on the qualitative and quantitative personnel requirements by taking into account time factor;

-         checking availability of personnel planning: setting the actual availability of personnel with regard to their qualitative, quantitative and temporal aspects of performance;

-         evaluating the inconsistency in actual and planned availability of employees performance: finding a deficit or surplus of employees and determining the cause of such a imbalance.

The essence of human resource planning is to create the conditions for giving people positions at the right time and in the required amount in accordance with their abilities, aptitudes and requirements of the business.