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| Resource Planning and Strategy |
The following are examples of how Martin Kingston & Associates can help you address critical human resource issues within your organization:
- Determining the numbers to be employed
An oversized organization will carry surplus or underutilized staff. Alternatively, if the opposite occurs, staff may be overstretched, making it hard or impossible to meet production or service deadlines at the quality level expected and ultimately de-motivating overall individual performance. So the questions we ask are:
- How can output be improved your through understanding the interrelation between productivity, work organization and technological development? What does this mean for staff numbers?
- What techniques can be used to establish workforce requirements?
- Have more flexible work arrangements been considered?
- How are the staff you need to be acquired?
The principles can be applied to any exercise to define workforce requirements, whether it be a business start-up, a relocation, or the opening of new factory or office.
- Retaining your highly skilled staff
Issues about retention may not have been to the fore in recent years, but all it needs is for organizations to lose key staff to realize that an understanding of the pattern of staff turnover is required. Staff turnover costs the organization directly through the bill for separation, recruitment and induction, but most importantly through a loss of long-term capability.
Martin Kingston & Associates can provide proactive or reactive solutions to this problem by:
- Analyzing the extent of resignation and staff turnover and discovering the reasons for it
- Determining what it is costing the organization
- Comparing loss rates with other similar organizations
Without this understanding, management may be unaware of the true cost and extent as to how many good quality staff are being lost. Having understood the nature and extent of staff turnover, steps can be taken to rectify the situation. These may be relatively inexpensive and simple solutions once the reasons for the departure of employees have been identified.
- Managing an effective downsizing programme
This is an all too common issue for managers. How is the workforce to be cut painlessly, while at the same time protecting the long-term interests of the organization? A question made all the harder by the time pressures management is under, both because of business necessities and employee anxieties. Resource Planning helps by considering:
- the sort of workforce envisaged at the end of the exercise
- the pros and cons of the different routes to get there
- how the nature and extent of wastage will change during the run-down
- the utility of retraining, redeployment and transfers
- what the appropriate recruitment levels might be
Such an analysis can be presented to senior managers so that the cost benefit of various methods of reduction can be assessed, and the time taken to meet targets established.
- Where will the next generation of managers come from?
Many senior managers are troubled by this issue. They have seen traditional career paths disappear. They have had to bring in senior staff from elsewhere. But they recognize that while this may have dealt with a short-term skills shortage, it has not solved the longer term question of managerial supply: what sort, how many, and where will they come from? To address these questions we will assist you in understanding:
- the present career system (including patterns of promotion and movement, of recruitment and wastage)
- the characteristics of those who currently occupy senior positions
- the organization's future supply of talent
- the organization's future requirements, in number and type indicating your current supply to future demands and identifying surpluses and shortages allowing for recommendations on corrective action
Martin Kingston & Associates will recommend appropriate recruitment, deployment and severance policies to be pursued to meet your business needs.
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