The Impact of Effective Human Resources

Planning on the Utilization of Workers

Figure 01

Planning on the Utilization

Many businesses find themselves with underutilized employees or workers without the specific skills

they need to grow with the company. Planning your workforce needs in advance and then monitoring

your workers’ performance pays dividends in a variety of ways that directly and indirectly improve your

bottom line. Create a human resources strategy that reviews your current staffing situation and plans

for long-term growth to make sure you use your workers productively and efficiently.

Proper Organizational Structure

Figure 02

Human resources planning evaluates your current staffing needs, what they might be a year from now

and where they might be beyond that. Using this information, a human resources professional develops

an organization chart that identifies the positions you need, creates detailed job descriptions for each

position and ranks them. This process helps identify current employees who aren’t being used

effectively and considers other work they can do or what training they need to improve their

productivity. (Steve, 2003)

Better Scheduling

Figure 03

A human resources plan takes into account your sales and production schedules to maximize employee

scheduling. For example, during your busy season, you might reflexively add more workers or another

shift. If you can anticipate your production and inventory needs in advance, a human resources

professional might be able to save you money by showing you that producing inventory during slow

periods and carrying it until you sell it later might be less expensive than hiring more workers, adding a

shift or paying overtime. Human resources planning also takes into account the fact that you’ll have

workers out with sick days and creates contingency plans to deal with this. This could include having

temporary contract help identified or having an infrastructure ready for short-term telecommuting.

Training

Figure 04

Some workers might be just a small amount of training away from being ready to handle more

responsibilities and support other employees and functions. A human resources plan should evaluate

the skills and experience for each position you have and then match the skills and experience of each

person in your organization to their written position needs to determine which ones need training.

When your human resources manager has this information, she can develop in-house training plans or

options such as tuition reimbursement to develop your workers so you can better utilize them. (Milano,

2018)

Retention

Figure 05

When workers leave, their peers often have to pick up the slack or have down time while they wait for a

new replacement to be trained and get up to speed. Effective human resources planning ensure that

you hire, train and manage workers effectively to reduce turnover. Creating written job descriptions

during your organizational planning not only helps you ensure all the tasks you need performed are

done but also helps you identify job candidates who are most likely to succeed if they are brought on

board.

References

Milano, 2018. Does HR Planning Improve Business Performance? Utilization of Workers, 3(11), pp.79-84.

Steve, 2003. How Can Human Resource Planning Assist an Organization? Effective Human Resources,

2(18), pp.432-36.