Introduction
Planning of Human Resources (HR) is an important aspect for the HR management. It provides assurances against many doubts in the future of organizations. For e.g., it controls employee needs, rationally predicts the company’s future manpower needs, avoids oversupply of employees and saves from cost errors. Although the process of work force Planning is well addressed in the literature, it faces a lot of challenges when applied. These challenges could prevent managers from correct application of HR practices in organizations and benefit from its important improvement as well as investment of effort, money and time in unreliable outcomes.
Literature review
Human resource development (HRD) recognise the employees with judgmental feelings and thoughts. Earlier, people use to focussed on productivity at any cost and mostly at the right or wrong behaviour of the employees. Organisations related the employee at the rational and logical level only and ignored the employee’s feeling. As feelings brings out the best human potential, slowly organisations learned that feelings are also important to create motivation for well productivity. Managers use to find innovative ways, such as sensitivity training and T-group sessions. Organisations soon recognised that the employee was an important resource. Employees are assets that can be used to achieve a goal to an organisation.
At present, many organisation palaces their workplace among the top assets. They have recognised that employee performance and productivity create the competitive edge. In service industry, people were the cutting edge.
Human resource management (HRM) has done a great job by standardising services that are operating in a hotel, restaurant or any organisation for that matter, e.g. there are standardised rooms at a Holiday Inn, also food at KFC (Kentucky Fried Chicken). It has worked for standardising services responses too, such as an operator of Vivanta by Taj in Aurangabad will say “Vivanta by Taj, Good morning. How may I assist you?” just as its operator in Bentota, Sri Lanka. These HR practices did a very significant job to get the product and services in a well standardise manner
(Andrews, 2006)
HRM perform an “high-performance work practices” organization. Human resource practices influence worker attitudes such as motivation and commitment and worker behaviors such as productivity and turnover. High-commitment human resource practices aimed to growth among employees, making highly involved employees who recognise with the organization.
Social exchange theory shows us that how human resource practices impact job attitudes in job satisfaction. Using the social exchange theory, human resource practices would give a sign to workers that the organization is faithful to them, which are shared by employees through high commitment work behaviours and positive attitudes. Similarly, it has been conforming that human resources practices lead this higher level of perceived organizational support on the employee part of side, that completely effects job satisfaction and organizational commitment.
Also, job satisfaction is related to job performance, retention and organizational commitment. 12 human resource practices are identified as high commitment practices. In the proprietary database that we used, there are six of these high commitment human resource practices access able: rewards and benefits (perception of equal opportunities in the workplace), performance management (feelings of job satisfaction and recognised for performance), information sharing (performance score at workplace), training and development (high level of training received), work-life policies (capability to manage work and life) and working in teams.
(Andreassi, Lawter, Brockerhoff, J., & Peter, 2014)
Similarly, cultures play a very important role in the workforce planning. With more elevated amounts of community will probably incline toward close working relationships with colleagues studies the effect of social values on occupation fulfillment among 461 self-managing groups in four nations (USA, Philippines Belgium and Finland).
Job satisfaction in community cultures will have a stronger relationship with individualistic cultures working in Team. Cultures which are characterized as success in terms of personal success as measured by material wealth and financial rewards, as compared to feminine cultures which place less emphasis on material success and place more value on personal relationships and quality of life.
Power distance is the degree to which members of a society without power accept the inequality in power. In high power distance cultures, such as Latin American cultures, inequality among social classes is accepted by both the higher social levels and the lower social levels with an underlying expectation that wealth and social status are fairly static within the culture. On the other hand, cultures in low power distant countries are generally considered to be equals regardless of inequities in characteristics such as wealth and an underlying assumption is that there is mobility to levels of wealth and status within the culture. In high power distance societies, subordinates expect superiors to behave in an autocratic, non-consultative manner and seek more guidance from supervisors. Western cultures (low power distance) espouse egalitarianism as a key cultural value in the workplace; eastern cultures (high power distance) expect a high degree of hierarchy and vertical distance among managerial levels. One could argue that within high power distance cultures, inequality is expected to be part of all organizational structures, such that if an employee is accustomed to experiencing social inequality in general, but experiences a perception of equality in the workplace, they will be more likely to value that equality, which, in turn, will increase job satisfaction.
The Process of HR Planning specifies how much personnel are needed by organizations in order to reach their strategic goals. Typically, it is about matching the number and skills of employees to business needs in the longer and/or shorter term. It enables managers to answer two basic questions. First, how many employees? Second, what sort of employees? HR planning, also, determines the suitable techniques of selecting, recruiting, and developing employees’ knowledge and skills so that the organization can improve its effectiveness. Accordingly, HR planning has an important role in strategic HR management.
As for the process of HR practices, it can be followed:
- Considering business strategic plans in terms of future activity levels and skills needed for new initiatives.
- Planning for a resource strategy by selection and recruitment of the best employees in order to meet organizational needs for employment of capable and skilled employees and achievement of competitive advantage.
- Preparing for a scenario planning via analysis of the likely situations in the internal and external environment and assessment of the possible actions that organization could adopt in different predictable situations.
- Forecasting future demand/supply for employees in terms of numbers and skills, determining the needed actions when forecasts indicate the deficit or surplus of employees.
- Analyzing labor turnover statistics in order to use these data as an input for supply forecasting, tracking the reason for employees’ resignation, and proposing actions to improve retention rates.
- Analyzing operational effectiveness in order to make better use of employees and adopting the flexibility approach that ensures satisfaction of employees’ needs and effectiveness of work.
- Analyzing work environment in terms of resources, the scope provided to employees to develop their skills, assessing job satisfaction and addressing actions to overcome any specific problem
The Strategic Problem Formulation (SPF) theory suggests that organizations often face complex, ill-structured strategic problems, such as problems related to business strategies. Such problems produce an initial symptom or a web of symptoms (such as the unreliable results of HR planning and the almost-difficult-to-apply process). Organizations can find solutions to such problems in order to be successful in today’s business environment. However, the most important and troubling task, when formulating solutions, is to find and define the problem itself. The SPF theory enables a better understanding of the problems and their causes so that researchers and practitioners can move effectively in search of solutions. SPF theory does a better understanding of the problems and their causes so that researchers and practitioners can move effectively in search of solutions. SPF theory engage a lot of different variables that could be unobservable. It also has a high degree of connectivity among the factors of the problem in a way that a change in any of the variables will affect the status of other variables. There is a dynamic component resulting in a change of the pattern of interactions over time.
(Saad, 2013)
Discussion
Standard operating procedures (SOPs) ensure consistency and quality are used to ensure consistency and quality and that team members are trained for the job. SOPs are a detailed explanation of how a policy is to be implemented. They communicate who will perform the task, what materials are necessary, where the task will take place, when the task will be performed and how the team member will execute the task. Learning and development initiatives Among the hotel’s learning and development initiatives are a welcome-day induction, training on handling complaints, English classes and lessons on communication. Everyone at the hotel can take part in a job-swap with, for example, senior directors working for a day in the kitchen. There are coaches in every department.
From Honing skills in communication, training and coaching HRM was able to perfect its knowledge in recruitment and develop the ability in assessing potential candidates with training that the hotel enabled me to undertake. The Landmark Spirit and train-the-trainer programs have helped to skill in communication, training and coaching to team members. It has also been able to undertake courses to perfect its sales skills with the Leading Learning Institute through the hotel’s membership of Leading Hotels of the World.
(The Landmark London stands out through its employees: Hotel earns champion status in Investors in People, 2013)
Conclusion
Since, performance management was an opportunity to identify weakness to be overcome, strengths to be further developed for both individual’s and organisation’s benefit. The management’s emphasis during present period had moved away from control to developing potential. It moved from reactive mode to a proactive.