Tuesday, November 9, 2010

Human Resource Planning - Importance

Human Resource Planning is a highly important and useful activity. If used properly, it offers a number of benefits:

i. Reservoir of talent: The organisation can have a reservoir of talent at any point of time. People with requisite skills are readily available to carry out the assigned tasks.

ii. Prepare people for future: People can be trained, motivated and developed in advance and this helps in meeting future needs for high-quality employees quite easily. Likewise, human resource shortages can also be met comfortably (when people quit the organisation for various reasons) through proper human resource
planning.

iii. Expand or contract: If the organisation wants to expand its scale of operations, it can go ahead easily. Advance planning ensures a continuous supply of people with requisite skills who can handle challenging jobs easily.

iv. Cut costs: Planning facilitates the preparation of an appropriate HR budget for each department or division. This, in turn, helps in controlling manpower costs by avoiding shortages/excesses in manpower supply. The physical facilities such as canteen, quarters, school, medical help, etc., can also be planned in advance.

v. Succession planning: Human Resource Planning, as pointed out previously, prepares people for future challenges. The ‘stars’ can be picked up and kept ready for further promotions whenever they arise. All multinational companies for example, have this policy of having a ‘hot list’ of promising candidates prepared in advance e.g., HLL, Proctor & Gamble, Godrej consumer products etc.3 Such candidates are rolled over various jobs and assessed and assisted continuously. When the time comes, such people ‘switch hats’ quickly and replace their respective bosses without any problem.