STRATEGIC PLANNING

Effectiveness of Strategic Planning and its influence on Human Resources Development

Effectiveness of Strategic Planning and its influence on Human Resources Development

Executive Summary

Automobile Maintenance Organisation (AMO) is a car maintenance organization with head office in Poole, UK. Although it has been in business for only 2 years, it has expanded to a total of sixty centres. As the business is growing rapidly and there is a shortage in the workforce, there are some problems going on among the employees. The main problem has been that it is difficult to recruit and keep qualified and committed employees. This report will discuss about human resource management as well as cover some of the problems and the solutions to the situation. Following are the main points:

Human resource planning and its benefits

Recruitment and selection

Employee work-life balance

Employee motivation

Industry standards of pay

Performance appraisals

Management and trade unions

Strategic overview

Introduction

Strategic Human Resource Planning

There is no doubt that human resource (HR) management plays an important role in an organization, and human resource planning is one of its functions. This section will discuss about the benefits that HR planning will bring to both employees and AMO itself.

Strategic planning

Strategic planning is about collecting relevant information to stimulate the visioning process and also programming the vision into what needs to be done to get there. (Torrington, D., Hall, L., Taylor, S., 2005, p.49).

Planning as strategic programming:

Clarifying strategies to make them operational, working out the consequences and identifying what must be done to achieve each strategy.

Planning as tools to communicate and control:

Can ensure coordination and encourage everyone to pull in the same direction.

Planners as analysts:

Analyzing hard data, external and internal to use in the strategy development process.

Planners as analysts:

Raising difficult questions and challenging the conventional wisdom to stimulate managers into thinking in more creative ways.

Strategic Planning and Human Resource Management

Stone (2002, p.15) states that strategy defines 'the direction that an organisation intends to move and set up the framework for action through which it intends to get there'. As the purpose of strategy, a position of advantage has maintained by capitalizing on the strengths of an organisation and minimizing its weaknesses. In order to achieve this purpose, the threats and opportunities present must have identified and analyzed in its external and internal environments. This is the reason why organisations need to develop strategies to deal with external influences and internal influences (Stone 2002).

DeCieri and Kramar (2005, p53) state that 'strategic management is a process or an approach that addresses the competitive challenges an organisation faces'. It can be explained as managing the pattern or plan that integrates an organisation's major goals, policies and action sequences into a whole. It is the highest level of managerial activity, usually performed by the senior manager or group of company, e.g. Chief Executive Officer (CEO) and executive team. To provide overall direction to the whole enterprise, an organisation's strategy must be appropriate for its resources, circumstances, and objectives by using strategic management. Also, the aims of strategic management helps the organisation to achieve a competitive advantage which is the ...