Overview
Human resources planning includes strategic management of a department responsible for your work force. In the human resources professional community, one of the topics revisited over and over is getting involved in organizational objectives to make an impact on business success. Your company can attain its goals by including the human resources department in matters that affect the business overall. In the meantime, your human resources has its own objectives, which can be integrated into the organizational objectives.
Raising Level of Job Satisfaction
Human resources planning today has a number of timely issues leaders recognize as objectives that will improve the workforce. One of the goals is raising the level of job satisfaction. You can measure job satisfaction through employee opinion surveys, focus groups or one-on-one meetings with employees. Job satisfaction manifests itself in terms of employee engagement, absenteeism and productivity. Higher levels of employee engagement–the continued interest and commitment of your employees–generally correlate to a higher level of job satisfaction among your employees. Studies indicate absenteeism reflects lower levels of job satisfaction and employee morale. In an article for “Corrections Today”, Kevin Whiteacre cites research that indicates, “Job satisfaction reduces absenteeism and turnover, and it can affect other ‘citizenship behaviors,’ such as compliance, altruism, dependability, punctuality, complaints, waste, cooperation, criticism of and arguing with others, and even housecleaning.”
Managing Multigenerational Workforce
Four generations populate today’s workforce–ranging from 20-something to nearly 70-something year-old employees. Each generation of workers has a contribution to make to your workplace, but each in its own way. For example, older employees are a resource for training inexperienced workers, and younger employees can devise new, technologically-advanced solutions to your business challenges. A human resources planning objective is to provide each generation with the type of feedback necessary to increase cohesiveness among the four distinct generations. This requires an understanding of what each age group has to offer and tapping your company’s wealth of talent. In an article for “Texas Business Review,” Stuart Greenfield predicts an employment crisis that is sure to affect this goal of human resources planning: “Receiving much less notice is a shortfall of another kind: the coming crisis in human resources. As more and more Texans near retirement age, employers will need to replace larger numbers of workers.”
Human Resources in Boardroom
A challenge for human resources for many years is proving to C-level executives that human resources deserves a seat at the boardroom table, or on the executive leadership team. Having evolved from personnel administration in the 1980s, human resources departments today are much more strategically managed. With this new level of competency in strategic HR management to contribute to your organization, human resources leaders want the opportunity to contribute more to the overall business goals. In a caustic review of human resources competencies, Fast Company contributor Keith H. Hammonds is reconciled to believe that, “After close to 20 years of hopeful rhetoric about becoming ‘strategic partners’ with a ‘seat at the table’ where the business decisions that matter are made, most human-resources professionals aren’t nearly there.” This reflects the view of many executive leadership teams who have the power to invite human resources leaders into the boardroom. Overcoming this sentiment is another important objective of human resources planning.
