Human Resource Planning: Requirements and Availability - Case Study Example

 Human Resource Planning: Requirements and Availability Human Resource Planning can be defined as a process of systematically reviewing human resource requirements to ensure that the required number of employees with the required skills are available when and where they are needed. Human Resource Planning consists of two components, requirements and availability. Forecasting human resource requirements: A requirements forecast is an estimate of the numbers and kinds of employees the organization will need at future dates in order to realize its stated goals. Before human resource requirements can be projected, demands for the firm's goods or services must be forecast. This forecast is then converted into people requirements for the activities necessary to meet the demand. Forecasting Human Resource Availability: Forecasting requirements provides managers with the means of estimating how many and what types of employees would be required. Determining whether the form will be able to secure employees with the necessary skills, and from what sources, is called an availability forecast. Its helps to show that whether the required employees can be obtained from within the company, from outside the company or from the combination of both the sources. Many of the workers that may be needed for future positions may already work for the firm. If the firm is small, management probably knows all the workers sufficiently well to match their skills and aspirations with the company's needs. Databases include information on all managerial and non-managerial employees. Information generally provided for non-managerial employees includes the following: Background and biographical data Work experience Specific skills and knowledge Licenses or certifications held In house training programs completed Previous performance appraisal evaluations Career goals Firms may maintain additional data for their managers. Essentially this type of inventory provides information for replacement and promotion decisions. It would include data such as these: Work history and experience Educational background Assessment of strengths and weaknesses Developmental needs Promotion potential at present and with further development Current job performance Field of specialization Job preferences Geographic preferences Career goals and aspirations Anticipated retirement data Personal history including psychological assessments Job Analysis Job analysis is the systematic process of determining the skills, duties and knowledge required for performing jobs in an organization. The purpose of job analysis is to obtain answers to six questions. 1. What physical and mental task does the worker accomplish? 2. When is the job to be completed? 3. Where is the job to be accomplished? 4. How does the worker do the job? 5. Why is the job done? 6. What qualifications are needed to do the job? Job analysis provides a summary of a job's duties and responsibilities, its relationship to other jobs, the knowledge and skills required and working conditions under which it is performed. Job analysis is performed on three occasions firstly when the organization is founded, secondly when new jobs are created and thirdly when jobs are changed significantly as a result of new technologies, new methods, procedures or systems. Reasons for conducting job analysis: Job analysis plays an important role is different sections of an organization. Staffing: all areas of staffing would be haphazard if the recruiter did not know the qualifications needed to perform the various jobs. Training and Development: job specification information often proves beneficial in identifying training and developmental tools. If the specification suggests that the job requires a specific skill, knowledge or ability and the person filling the position does not possess all the qualifications required, training or development is in order. Compensation and benefits: over here the relative value of a particular job must be known before a dollar value can be placed on it. Safety and health: information derived from job analysis is also valuable in identifying safety and health considerations like knowing from an employee if the job is hazardous. Employee and labor relations: job analysis information is important in employee and labor relations as when employees are considered for promotion, transfer or demotion, the job description provides a standard for comparison of talents. Legal considerations: having properly accomplished job analysis is particularly important for supporting the legality of employment practices. Job analysis for teams: in traditional organizations the work was compartmentalized into jobs or positions defined by functional or occupational domains, the result was disjointed execution, high unit cost, and long non competitive cycle times. With team design there are no narrow jobs. Importance of Job Analysis Job is the basis for pay. Knowledge of the job is essential either to make comparisons with other jobs in market pricing or as the first step in evaluating jobs internally. Thus, failure to secure complete and accurate job information will result in inaccurate job evaluation. Later steps in job evaluation become virtually impossible without adequate job information. Many organizations have numerous unique jobs that are not found in other organizations or within their geographic location. In these cases often only 30-40 jobs can be competitively benchmarked from among hundreds of unique positions. This leads to questions about fair pay. Job knowledge also has other uses in HRM besides setting pay. Organizations use information obtained by job analysis for recruitment, selection, and placement; organization planning and job design; training; grievance settlement; as well as job evaluation and other compensation programs. People outside the organization also use information about jobs. Career placement requires the same type of person-job matching as organizations. Getting a disabled worker back to work requires knowledge of jobs in order to determine what jobs the worker can do or can be trained to do. Lastly, job knowledge is needed in a number of regulatory situations. Various types of incentive schemes and their usefulness in achieving effective pay system. Behind the success of any company lie the employees. In order make employees produce the results required for success are only achieved through a flexible and creative reward system. Such a system keeps the employee motivated and contributes to profitability. For many companies incentive schemes are a win-win way of motivating and rewarding staff. Companies normally learn from the examples of other companies when deciding upon the incentive schemes. Lets see what Betfair, a betting company does to incentivise its employees. David Yu is a chief operating officer at Betfair and the winner of the award Best Places To Work Award in the media, hospitality, entertainment and leisure category. He says that they keep both tangible and financial incentives as well as intangible incentives like the environment provided to work. When their website is down they are not generating any revenue. Hence they use Uptime Bonus as means of encouraging its employees. If there are no unplanned downtime the IT team responsible for site availability gets a bonus. It is part of the scheme that the bonus should not be spent on bills. They are to be spent on a luxury, like some of the employees bought ipods, or took their partners out for a meal, or went for a sporting event. One of the engineers donated his bonus to the Tsunami appeal. Another tangible incentive offered is the Sharp Minds award. This is awarded, on the spot, to those employees who do something exceptional. Like once, an IT infrastructure director saved the company hundreds of thousands of pounds by striking good deals, and once, one of the engineers helped a top customer with their laptop, at a casino at midnight. Another engineer developed a version of the site to run on PDAs and mobile phones, in his own time. These on the spot awards are not only an award but also a raffle ticket. On special occasions like Christmas the chief executive picks some for a grand prize. Last year, 10 of the 30 Smart Minds winners were flown, with their partners, first class to Sun City in South Africa, staying in a luxury hotel, with a safari, a balloon flight and a gala dinner. Share ownership is yet another tangible incentive that Betfair offers. More than 80% of its employees own shares either through a save as you earn scheme or share options. Betfair operates at a more personal level, which can be even more important to the individuals concerned. Like, one of Betfair's engineer whose mother was ill and lived in Greece. The engineer felt she ought to resign to go and nurse her, but instead an arrangement was made for her to work remotely from Greece until her mother is better. BT Indirect Channels (BTIC) is a UK based broadband connections business. BTIC also has incentive scheme for its resellers. In an effort to accelerate demand the company is offering resellers up to £100 for each Business Broadband connection they sell, on top of their usual revenue share. Marks & Spencer is setting up three new incentive schemes to motivate the ailing store chain's 400 top staff. The schemes are based on driving bottom line profits growth and earnings per share and will offer qualifying staff the opportunity to more than quadruple their salaries if the financial results achieved "substantially exceed" targets. The three new incentive plans are a new cash bonus scheme, a performance share plan and a share option scheme. The maximum cash bonus payable is 150% of base salary. It will be extended to the chain's most senior 400 staff. The top 100 will have to defer 50% of any bonus paid into shares for three years. Compare control approach and personal approach When we talk of Control approach the goal of HRM is to reduce labor costs or improve efficiency by enforcing employee compliance with specified rules and procedures and biasing employee rewards on some measurable output criteria. Examples of Control Approach may include: The 360 Degree Evaluation: this is a multi rater evaluation that involves input from multiple levels within the firm and external sources as well. Rating Scales Method: this is a widely used performance appraisal method that rates employees according to defined factors. Work Standards Method: this is a method that compares each employee's performance to a predetermined standard or expected level of output. Ranking: a job evaluation method in which the rater simply places all employees from a group in rank order of overall performance. Forced Distribution Method: an appraisal approach in which the rater are required to assign individuals in a work group to a limited number of categories similar to a normal frequency distribution. Forced Choice Performance Report: a performance appraisal technique in which the rater is given a series of statements about an individual and indicates which items are most or least descriptive of the employee. Behaviorally Anchored Rating Scales (BARS) Method: a performance appraisal method that combines elements of the traditional rating scale and critical incidents methods. Critical Incident Method: requires a written record of highly favorable and unfavorable employee work. On the other hand Personal approach is like rewarding employees after personally observing them. In today's high-tech business environment, a highly personal approach to re-warding employees is paramount. Some examples of Personal Approach are: Offer personal congratulations. Taking personal note of an accomplishment is one of the highest-ranking incentives that you can offer. A personal note from one's manager is also right up there. Public praise is also effective. Make time in staff meetings to acknowledge successes, for example. Use open communications as much as possible. Applause. A form of recognition yes, but a very specific form. Physically applaud your people by giving them a round of applause for specific achievements. One-on-One Coaching. Coaching is employee development. Your only cost is time. Time means you care. Leadership Roles. Give your people leadership roles to reward their performance and also to help you identify future promotable people. Time Off. Implement contests that earn time off. People will compete for 15 minutes or 1/2 hour off just as hard as they will for a cash award References R Wayne Mandy, Robert M. Noe, Shane R. Premeaux c 2002, Human Resource Management 8/e, Prentice Hall. Read More