Strategic human resource planning means the alignment between the human resource architecture and performance of a firm (Becker & Huselid 2006). This should be adaptable to organisational changes that could affect human resource development to usher targeted performance outcomes. Organisation changes that could affect HRD could be retrenchment, expansion or growth, and stabilisation as corporate objectives. These organisational changes have common and varying implications on human resource development.
One common impact is change in organisational size and structure (Becker & Huselid 2006). Retrenchment involves contraction, growth requires an expansion, and stability requires the reinforcement of existing human capabilities. Another common impact is the role of an effective and responsive human resource planning (Becker & Huselid 2006) to meet the number of workers with the desire skills when needed by the organisation. Also read about components of staffing
The difference is that the focus of retrenchment is retention, the target of growth is recruitment, and the intention of stabilisation is reinforcement that triangulates number of people, skills and time of need. Strategic human resource planning needs to consider these organisational changes as context because different changes occurring in an organisation have varying impact on HRD. Retrenchment, growth and stability have different impact on human resource development. Successful human resource planning for retrenchment would leave the organisation with the needed number of people with the required skills.
This could provide retained employees with opportunities to expand the application of their skills through multi-tasking but this could also negatively affect the morale of surviving employees (Gilmore & Hirschhorn 2006). Remuneration and job enrichment could be effective solutions. A well-planned human resource growth enables the organisation to recruit the people matching its skills requirement. Additional employees could improve performance (Bordoloi & Matsuo 2002) with more people contributing to output but issues such as diversity could arise.
Remuneration and other motivational activities could address these issues. An encompassing stability plan could develop and optimize the capabilities of existing employees (Bordoloi & Matsuo 2002) but this requires the consideration of job analysis, deployment, training, performance assessment, and remuneration. Strategic human resource planning is adaptable to various organisational changes because this flexibly aligns the components of the human resource plan with corporate plan. The alignment ensures positive corporate performance outcomes.
List of References
Becker B & Huselid M, 2006, ‘ Strategic human resources management: where do we go from here? ’, Journal of Management, vol. 32, no. 6, pp. 898-925.
Bordoloi S & Matsuo, H, 2002, ‘ Human resource planning in knowledge-intensive operations: a model for learning with stochastic turnover’, European Journal of Operational Research, vol. 130, no. 1, pp. 169-189.
Gilmore T & Hirschhorn L, 2006, ‘ Management challenges under conditions of retrenchment’, Human Resource Management, vol. 22, no. 4, pp. 341 – 357.