Strategic Human Resource Planning

Strategic Human Resource Planning….what is it all about, we would wonder. During the conversation with the operations manager, I realize that the company would need to know what the profiles of our employees, what can the organisation do to serve the customers. Wow, that’s important. We all knew that we need to stay relevant and our Human Resource must have the employable skills. How’s about ourselves and how do we establish the Strategic Human Resource Planning.

The operations manager shared this view about strategic Human Resource planning. In a simple term, it means, we need to know where our business is heading and Human Resource department will initiate a briefing to look into the horizon and identify the type of people, capability building and training required as part of strategic Human Resource planning process. From the strategic Human Resource planning process, each of us would look into our business direction and do a Human Resource audit.The Human Resource audit, as he explained, is:

1. What is the competency of our department staff?
2. Are their current performances that meet the expectation of customers?
3. What action we need to take to improve the current effectiveness in serving the customers?
4. With the market changes, what new or enhance operation efficiency to meet the challenges of tomorrow?

That’s great. We now get to know why Human Resource is considered the internal business partner to initiate strategic Human Resource planning and guide the organisation to next level of performance.
Since we know the important of strategic Human Resource planning, we still need to know how to identify the people we need and what is the manpower cost in doing the business. Obviously you may argue how we do it right at the first time.

I decided to discuss with the Human Resource manager on this critical topic, strategic Human Resource planning and its follow-up for tracking. The Human Resource manager highlighted as follows:

1. The pre-requisite of the job (current or future position) and why this pre-requisite is a must. That means that I need to establish one up to three key competencies required for the job.
2. The school or institution that provides graduate for these knowledge and skills that we need. We can either send our current employee to attend or recruit the fresh graduates.
3. Prepare a 12-month planning period for Human Resource need and Human Resource Development program.
4. Lastly prepare a Human Resource budget with timeline.

We know that things get done through people. Fail to plan is plan to fail. So we need to do strategic Human Resource Planning.

© Copyright 2008 KnowledgeMediaNetworks, LLC.