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0:00
My name is Professor
Christine Cross and I
work at the University
of Limerick in Ireland.
The topic of this presentation
is Workforce Planning
and Talent Management.
0:11
Do you know where
you will be and what
you will be doing in
five years' time?
For many of you, this will be
a difficult question to answer.
However, this is an issue
facing most organisations.
Their response will reveal
a great deal about how
their employees will need to be
managed during that period.
This is what we call
workforce planning.
Workforce planning is ensuring
the right number of people
with the necessary
skills are employed in
the right place at the
right time to help
deliver an organisation's short
and long-term objectives.
In many ways, the HR function
is attempting to see
into the future to help
make decisions in
the present day.
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Workforce planning is
an open-ended process.
The planning process occurs in
a continuous cycle and
there are three key stages.
The first is stocktaking and
involves the identification
of the factors
that are likely to
shape the operation of the firm.
Two broad categories of
factors are assessed.
External factors and
internal factors.
There are lots of external
factors that affect
organisations and they can be
very difficult to predict,
such as the economic climate,
the employment legislation and
technological advancement.
Internal factors are those
organisational forces
that impact the day-to-day
running of the firm,
such as the profile
of the workforce.
Are they young or
are they aging?
The conditions that people
work in and team dynamics.
Assessing the HR profile
of the organisation is
effectively taking a snapshot
of the current
staffing arrangements.
The second stage of human
resource planning requires
forecasting both the supply
of labour and the
demand for labour.
This is arguably
the most difficult aspect
of workforce planning.
As the HR function
is tasked with
predicting how many employees
will be required in the future,
as regards forecasting
the supply of labour,
the organisation examines
both internal and
external sources.
An important dimension of
assessing the internal supply of
labour is what the HR function
describes as
succession planning.
This refers to the process
through which a successor for
a departing staff member
can be found in a way
that minimizes any disruption
to the organisation.
The third stage then is
to develop action plans,
implement the plans
and assess them.
When an imbalance occurs between
the demand for and
the supply of labour,
the organisation is
either faced with
a labour shortage or
a labour surplus.
Where a shortage exists
or is likely to happen,
the firm has a number of
options open to them,
including recruitment,
retraining or redeployment.
A labour surplus typically
requires the organisation to
seek redundancies or to
reduce the number
of hours worked.
Once the organisation
has made their decision,
the plans are set in motion.
Given the turbulent nature
of the contemporary
business environment,
plans need to be constantly
monitored and adjusted.
The final stage of
workforce planning is
the assessment stage,
where the action plans are
evaluated to determine
the extent to
which they have allowed
the organisation
to achieve its strategic goals.
