Alignment of staffing strategy with organizational strategy - Essay Example

Human resource professionals deal with such areas as employee recruitment and selection, performance evaluation, compensation and benefits, professional development, safety and health, forecasting, and labor relations. Some of the challenges today in human resource management are maintaining a diverse workforce, dealing with major technological changes, keeping up with governmental regulations, handling corporate restructuring and downsizing, and formulating strategies essential to personnel management.

As a result, many executives have suggested that effective Human Resources (HR) strategies are one of the most important aspects of successfully implementing organizational strategy within the company. For the past decades, there have been profound changes on how the role of the people in business success has been perceived. These changes have promoted the view that people management is important in maximizing organizational capabilities and should be integrated with the strategic aims of the business.

One of these notable changes includes the reinvention of the government, which emphasizes on the need for performance measurement, increased efficiency and enhanced political accountability (Osborne and Gaebler, 1992). In the aspect of personnel administration, this change implies the significance of political efficiency and responsiveness as values. Moreover, the reinvention of the government had introduced the need for personnel administrators to work in coordination with other systems, which in turn leads to objective attainment and cost control.

Change has brought about many important goals of HRM into view. For An example of which is the significance of labour productivity. Some authors have pointed out that labour productivity should be seen as the major goal of an organisation's labour management (Osterman, 1987). It is the touchstone against which every human resource policy should be evaluated. Thus, in formulating certain HR policies, integrating means that will promote greater productivity or cost-efficacy, should be taken into account.

Aside from labour productivity, change has also introduced the need for organisational flexibility. Within this term, the word organisational is used as employers usually seek forms of flexibility that extend beyond, but cover, their employee relations (Streeck, 1987). Within the aspect of organizational flexibility, two related factors should be considered. These are short-run responsiveness and long-run agility. Short-run responsiveness involves financial and numerical flexibility. It also includes the attempt to employ workers who are multi-skilled or cross-trained.

This functional flexibility aids the organisation to maintain lower headcount but cope better with marginal improvements in production processes or product design. Long-run agility on the other hand, is more powerful yet conceptually ambiguous (Dyer and Shafer, 1999). This factor refers to the ability of the firm to learn within an environment that changes rather drastically. Strategic Staffing in an OrganizationIt can be said that human-resource planning is a challenge because the needs of the organization are constantly changing and sometimes do not converge and such challenge can be greater if the Strategic Staffing pool is limited or