Workforce planning and leadership development in human resources

Current HR Issues What is workforce planning? Why is this essential to the organization? Who is responsible for workforce planning? Workforce planning is a form of long-range planning the facilitates companies meeting the goal of “getting the right number of people with the right competencies in the right jobs at the right time” (Sinclair, 2004). Workforce planning is therefore essential to the organization because each role that the organization needs filled will, in a perfect world, be filled with the right people at the right time. Being able to recruit and retain the right talent to make this work is one of the essential elements of workforce planning. The importance of workforce planning is perhaps best understood in terms of what happens without it – people are in jobs they can’t perform, there are vacancies throughout the organization and ultimately, the growth and effectiveness of the organization is compromised.
Responsibility for workforce planning is organization-wide. The Human Resources department has the greatest impact on this process, but ultimately each functional manager needs to think ahead, with a vision for what they will need. These visions need to be tied to the overall corporate strategy, in order to provide sufficient lead time for recruitment, and for the development of the competencies and skills that will be needed in the future. Input from each department with respect to what it needs today, and will need in the future, in order to successfully fill each position and execute its part of the overall strategy, is an integral component of workforce planning. So while HR can spearhead different initiatives, and train managers on how to apply the concept of workforce planning within their departments and organizations, there is a significant contribution to be made by managers and leaders throughout the organization, including the highest levels, where decisions about resource availability are made. By tying the human resource function to strategy execution, the organization will be more successful in the long run. Describe and explain the importance of leadership development and how can organizations encourage and enhance this type of development? For any organization to be successful, its leadership must be cultivated. Simply put, it is easier to groom leaders than to find them from outside the company. Thus, a human resources department should develop a leadership development program.
Leadership development has a number of different components. Yukl (2001) explains that because leadership has a number of different components, any organization will have leaders who can specialize in these different components. What this means for a human resources organization is that it is important to understand what it needs in its leaders, where the gaps are with its existing leadership pool, and what specific programs it can initiate to build those leaders for the future.
Organizations can encourage leadership development by creating mentorship programs, and awareness of the need for managers to identify future leaders from within their ranks. Mentors can help people feel good enough about their role within the company to stay, but further to that can help them to build the skills that they will need in the future.
Another way that organizations can encourage leadership development is to create pathways for juniors to learn key leadership skills, maybe without the burden of full responsibility. Furthermore, leadership development should be encouraged as part of the corporate culture. Sometimes managers specifically refrain from providing opportunities for others to grow, out of their own defensiveness, so developing leaders has to be ingrained in the corporate culture at the highest level, to ensure that the current crop of leaders is doing all that they can do in order to foster the next generation of leaders within the company. Further, cheat sheets that help managers to identify future leaders from within their ranks will help – some managers favor employees who aren’t actually that strong in leadership potential, and this is where the organization can provide some guidance as to what is expected. Describe and explain HR’s role in the organization's diversity and inclusion efforts (i.e. recruiting, training, and competitive advantage). Why is diversity essential to the workplace? The role of human resources in diversity and inclusion starts with hiring – ensuring that the hiring process is designed to be as inclusive as possible, using techniques that specifically screen out things that might subject a person to bias. But HR can also implement diversity training and awareness programs, in order to ensure that other managers are aware of the issues, and take them into account, in particular freeing themselves from their own biases.
Beyond this, HR has a few other things it can contribute. HR is one of the key drivers of the organizational culture. A culture of diversity and inclusiveness is really one of the best methods of ensuring the organization has a good diversity and inclusiveness component. One of the big reasons is because after the hiring process, people have to work at a company, and turnover of diverse talent can become a problem if the values of diversity and inclusiveness are not baked into the organizational culture (Chavez & Weisinger, 2008).
Diversity is essential to the workplace for a variety of reasons. The biggest one is that a higher degree of diversity allows the organization to vet its ideas against a broader range of perspectives. Solutions that would not be apparent to a group of similar people might be obvious to someone from a different background or perspective. Furthermore, diversity plays an especially powerful role for companies that market to consumers, because having a broader range of thinking and cultural values, that better represent the customer base, makes a company more like to be in tune with its customers and serve them better. But even for companies that are B2B or not especially customer-centric, having a diverse range of perspectives and ideas often leads to better outcomes financially, because of the greater degree of rigor applied to ideas. Describe and explain HR’s role in adapting to innovation. How does HR anticipate future needs and circumstances? How does HR create a culture of innovation? There are a few ways that HR can contribute to innovation. Fostering a culture that embraces change and creative thinking is definitely one of them. Innovation is something that comes from creative thinking, and it comes from being able to adapt and solve problems. Some organizations do not have a culture that fosters this type of thinking. HR cannot create a culture on its own, but it can be a strong voice for that sort of culture, encourage managers to look for those traits when hiring and promoting, and advise the executive leadership on the importance of building innovative thinking into the company culture, and what some of the best practices are for this (Lau & Ngo, 2004).