These are:
- Translation of business plans into manpower needs
- Evaluation of individuals' talents and estimate of their potential
- Catalog of skills
- Manning tables or back-up charts
- Plans for promotable individuals
- Review and recycling of the process
Let's review how each of these is usually carried out and examine its adequacy.
Business Plans and Manpower Plans
Most companies periodically redefine the nature of their business, the value of their product or service, and their basic strategy. This is usually done by top management with specialized staff assistance. The projection into the future ranges from 5 to 20 years.
The vice-president of personnel or the personnel director is then given the task of estimating critical manpower needs based on business planning decisions. This involves him and his associates in exploring the many trends that affect people, their knowledge, skill, interests, life style, and availability. Such data can be found in government bulletins, publications of survey groups, foundations, educational institutions, and similar sources. Many judgments are based on available information, usually projected from past experience, about the ability of the firm to attract and retain employees, the probable shifts in organization structure, the change in numbers and kinds of managerial talent, the need for special skills at professional and nonprofessional levels, changes in geographic location, and other factors that affect staffing requirements.
With the help of line managers, a rough timetable of the more important needed manpower actions is drawn up. It becomes a sort of master plan for adding or subtracting personnel, changing the mix of talent within the firm, introducing specialized training, and similar critical steps.
This process will probably continue into the foreseeable future. The computer may help explore alternatives of structure, talent mix, and the like so that apparently optimum choices can be made. As suggested earlier, this is an imprecise prediction at best. With it, however, progress can be measured against the planned targets and adjustments can be made as they're needed or desired. Without it, we don't know where we're going so we have no way of determining whether we're getting there.
Personnel Evaluation
It is the difficult step of evaluation that halts the manpower planning process and keeps it from being the powerful tool it was designed to be. The personnel staff, holding the master personnel plan, wishes to know the extent to which current employees can be counted on to fill anticipated needs. Staff members usually devise a form, therefore, that the immediate manager or supervisor is asked to complete with the help of each employee. The form requests a mix of the employee's personal biographical data, work experience history, and career interests as well as a rating of his performance on his present job and of his potential. The last may call for one or more of several evaluations. Some forms ask for the most complex, responsible position the individual is likely to be able to hold successfully. Some want a rating of his immediate promotability. Others ask for his percentile position on a normal curve of promotability as compared with that of his associates. Still others request a rating of his ability to achieve one or more of his expressed career interests. Almost all seek descriptive information about the strengths and weaknesses he would display in specified future jobs if he were to attain them.
The problem is that evaluation is not a process that managers are overly fond of-nor do they do it well. There is a great deal of paperwork if all the data are to be recorded. If the material is discussed with the employee, it is time-consuming at minimum. It may also force some managers to soften their evaluation, making it less accurate than is desirable. But if evaluations are not softened, they may well disturb some excellent workers, whose performance may deteriorate as a result or who may leave if they feel their careers will be limited by staying.
Now, we can say that business planning predictions are imprecise and that we can take care of the health of the business by adjusting and recycling them at suitable times. But when we are dealing with human beings whose lives are affected by procedures known to be imprecise, we cannot be so glib. Here is an area where cither appraisals must be improved or their role in career advancement must be made less important. In view of current knowledge, the latter seems sounder.
Skills Catalog
If the firm is small, the basic data noted on the manpower planning form may be kept on file, or they may be coded and a mechanical system used for easy access. If the firm is of such size that data on all employees cannot be efficiently stored, only those considered promotable, most promotable, or promotable outside their current organization component are placed in the inventory. High-speed electronic storage and sorting systems may be used.
Most firms feel the storage system itself is adequate. But this method raises other problems needing solution:
- Whose data should be stored?
- What information should be stored?
- How can it be kept up to date?
- How can more accurate and relevant evaluative information be made available?
- Who should have access to stored information?
- Should the individual know whether he is in the inventory and what it says about him?
To supplement the general manpower planning information, managers are often asked to prepare organization charts showing the present structure and the incumbents in all positions. They are asked in addition to list three individuals who are in their opinion best qualified to replace each incumbent. Some color or letter code is used to indicate either the degree of qualification of each back-up specified or the number of years it will take each to be ready for the job in question. A refinement of this practice is to ask the manager to prepare these charts not according to the present structure but as he anticipates it will be in, say, six months or one year.
This procedure suffers from the ills of all prediction, but still it appears to be a useful device for looking in depth at the organization. It becomes more powerful as the manager reviews it with the manager at the next higher level and as he repeats the process at regular intervals, probing reasons for changes, job placements that have not followed the indicated choice, and so on.
Solutions are needed, however, at least to the following problems:
- Should the individual know he is or is not on the back-up chart?
- Should he agree to his candidacy if he is named?
- If he is aware of his candidacy for one or more positions, what should be done if he is not selected when an opening occurs?
