Implementing Strategic Staffing - Essay Example

Strategic Management The term strategic staffing is used to de s an organization’s process of identifying and addressing the issues of staffing in their over all strategy and objectives for their business. The main objective that companies achieve by implementing strategic staffing is to address the issue of staffing on the long term basis while complying with short term needs of staffing of an organization. The primary issues in development of such a plan is the identification of the number of employees that will be required at a certain point in time by the organization, another issue is that the organization’s workforce might not have the required skills and abilities to perform tasks (Bechet 7). 2. Staffing strategy is a term used to denote the long-term plan which provides direction to the organization regarding the staffing issue; the strategy focuses on the supply and demand of the staffing issue with the objective of ensuring that the organization is able to meet the demands of the required workforce. While staffing strategy is created for the longer run, staffing plans are created for the short run and these plans address staffing issues in the short run, the issues addressed are the shortage and surplus of staff members in the short run (Bechet 17). 3. There are two staffing levels, the deficit level, in which the number of staff members required and the kind of skills and abilities required by a company are not available to the company, the second level is staffing surplus when the number of required staff members is higher than the required number and the skills and abilities required are even in compliance with the desired skills and abilities required by the organization (Bechet 79). Staffing level can be determined in a quantitative manner in which emphasis is on the head count and the qualitative manner in which the emphasis is on desired skills and abilities. An organization achieves right staffing levels when their staff members have the desired skills and abilities and the headcount is equal or more than the desired amount of staff members. 4. Uncontrollable actions that arise while an organization develops its staffing model include voluntary turnover, retirement and losses caused as a result of employees taking planned leaves (Bechet 50). Voluntary turnover takes place when employees leave the organization out of their own will, retirements take place when employees reach a certain age and the organization no longer needs them and losses arise because the employee takes leave from the organization due to health related issues and because he/she is called to serve the army. Controllable staffing actions that arise during the creation of a strategic staffing model are hiring new employees, promoting employees internal and transferring employees externally. 5. Staffing ratio is referred to the amount of work that needs to be conducted or the targeted output and the number of employees that will be required by the organization to conduct those tasks (Bechet 85). These ratios are expressed in the form of the total output per individual can produce. For example: An insurance company expects per individual insurance policy seller to sell 100 policies per year. Once the workload that will be shared by one individual within the firm, the firm then divides the total required output with the output produced by one individual. For example the firm budgeted to sell 1000 policies per year, this means that a total of 10 employees will be required and per individual will sell 100 policies. 6. In order to engage line managers in the process of work force planning, the HR department needs to inform the line managers about the steps that will be involved in the planning process, come into an agreement with the line managers about the information that has been used by the HR department to create assumptions, HR department have to help the line managers in understanding the outcomes that will be derived from the planning process and the line managers have to be made comfortable with the strategies, preparations, and the actions that will be needed to be conducted in accordance to the process of strategic staffing (Bechet 78). 7. The unit of the organization responsible for development of managerial level position candidates will first create a pool of candidates to replace the senior management before the need of doing so actually arises (Bechet 156). This act will help in ensuring that the organization has qualified members within the organization to fill in the gaps that will be created by the departure of senior management. The activity of succession planning is quite proactive in nature and this act includes an analysis of what managerial qualities are required and managers are developed accordingly. During this process, the organization should not identify who will be the manager in advanced and should rather develop more than one manager simultaneously. 8. The top level management may show resistant towards fully adopting the strategic staffing plans, in this case, the HR staff have to ensure that the top level management fully understands the entire process and they have to inform that these plans will be designed in accordance to the needs of the management (Bechet 179). The top level management is more interested in the short term effect that the plan will have, thus the HR needs to inform them about the short term benefits that will be derived from the plan. 9. The Zero-Based Approach is utilized when planning is conducted to figure out the exact number of required employees of different types of employees that may be needed by the organization a different point in time (Bechet 91). This approach does not take into consideration the umber of similar types of employees already working within the organization. To use this approach in planning, first the planner needs to identify the moments at which particular staff will be required, identify the kinds of projects that will be operational at that particular time, determine the required employees for different projects at different time periods, and then add all the units of required employees to find the exact total number of staff members required. 10. The first step of strategic staffing process is identification of the staffing issue that is most critical, in this step issues are to be defined in accordance to their level of priority and those need to be addressed for which specific strategies need to be developed (Bechet 39). In step two the strategy maker has to create a forecast which will pay emphasis to the demand and surplus issue of the staffing requirements. In the third step, the strategy maker addresses the gaps by creating a plan that is directional in nature and will help solve the issue. In the last step the strategy maker needs to address the short term needs in context of the long term requirements. 11. The steps conducted in implementation of the strategic staffing plan in horizontal as well as vertical implementation program are same, the difference lies between the impacts of the program. The horizontal program addresses the issue of impact at the end and the vertical one address the issue on each stage of implementation and calculates the impact on each stage. The vertical one is better than the horizontal one as this will help in determining impact on each stage and if the impact on one stage is not as desired, then the organization can make changes to the plan to ensure that each stage of implementation is effective (Bechet 172). 12. In horizontal approach the purpose of the approach is to impact the entire organization while utilizing an approach that is step by step in nature (Bechet 171). In this implementation approach the focus is on implementing the plan on a larger scale. In this approach each step is implemented and the emphasis is on have a little impact for the entire plan. While using this approach one step is started when the earlier step has been completed. In vertical approach the aim is same and the implementation procedure is same as in the horizontal approach. Here the focus is on having an impact on individual pieces of the organization, rather than impacting the entire organization. Works Cited Bechet, Thomas P.. Strategic staffing: a comprehensive system for effective workforce planning. 2nd ed. New York: American Management Association ;, 2008. Print. Read More