HR Planning

HR planning, or human resources planning, is a process of determining a company's "people" needs. Deciding that someone needs to be hired who can handle company graphics, or that another sales person should be hired, are all part of HR planning. Anytime a company decides that a person should be hired to fill a position, that falls under human resources planning. Creating strategies for finding the best employees and keeping them, as well as making sure that current employees are in the best positions for their talent, are all a part of this type of planning.

The HR Planning Process

Some processes have a very clear set of steps and instructions that should be followed in order for the process to be done successfully. Building a bookshelf is something that can have a set number of steps with very detailed instructions that are best followed in order. But just as with many management processes and practices, HR planning is something that really has no set of rigid instructions to follow. There are many different approaches, and experts may disagree on any list of things that should be done in a specific order. But there are certain aspects of the process that should be included in effective HR planning to help it succeed. 

A key aspect of the planning process, and one that needs to be nailed down before any of the others for best results, is understanding the company's workforce (an HR audit will help with this). A clear understanding of why the specific employees are there and what they offer the company is necessary to help plan for hiring needs in the future. This can help a company avoid having too many people to do one type of job and not enough in other areas. An analysis of the existing workforce and their skills is an important part of HR planning and the one that the effectiveness of the other steps really rests upon.

Once the current workforce is understood, it's also necessary to identify internal obstacles to the human resource planning process. One very easy to understand example of an HR obstacle is the lack of budget to hire another employee that seems to be clearly needed. If a company has no IT department but finds itself in need of someone with that skill set, then the financial inability to hire such a person is a clear obstacle to good HR planning. Only by identifying these obstacles can steps be taken to remove them, such as cutting costs in areas that are wasteful to make the budget available to hire that IT employee.

External obstacles are another important factor. A supply shortage or some type of environmental factor could represent this type of obstacle. The housing slump is a good example. If a company projects that people won't be buying houses in the near future and this will cut into their income, that's a definite external factor that could affect their ability to hire necessary employees in other areas. This makes it necessary to look forward and try to predict potential problems so those can be taken into consideration.

Based on the projected need for people and the potential problems facing the company from both inside and outside, the HR planner then needs to make a projection about the company's HR needs in the future. A determination should also be made about whether or not the company is meeting its current staffing needs effectively, whether that means that too many people are there, too few people are there, or some people are in the wrong positions for their skill sets.

Once everything is analyzed, then HR planning switches to strategy. In a perfect world, the HR manager would simply correct anything found amiss during the analysis and move on. But this isn't always possible. Several gaps could be found, so it may be necessary to prioritize those problems and deal with the most important first while relegating the less urgent problems to a later date. Someone with a good understanding of how each employee fits into the scheme of the company is crucial for the prioritizing stage. If the person doesn't understand which people handle which tasks and why those might be the best choice to fix now will make mistakes at this stage and potentially cost a company time and money.

Finally, HR planning needs to have some sort of built-in system for monitoring its own effective. This includes things like evaluating employees. An HR process can't be successful if there's no way to monitor it to make sure that the priorities, strategies and efforts that have been put into place are actually doing what was intended. A method of tracking employees from hiring and beyond to make sure they're in the right positions and helping the company work towards its goals is vital. And the people in charge of HR planning have to be able to look at the statistics like efficiency, turnover and performance and make any necessary changes in their process to improve it as needed.