Marketing Communication

CHAPTER ONE: ELEMENT OF MANPOWER PLANNING
1.1 What is Manpower Planning?
Business (2000) defines it as a function of the Human Resources Manager in larger organizations and owner/managers in smaller concerns. It refers to the procedure of trying to forecast the number of workers a company will need in future years.
1.2 Function of Manpower planning
The penalties for not being correctly staffed are costly.
· Understaffing loses the business economies of scale and specialization, orders, customers and profits.
· Overstaffing is wasteful and expensive, if sustained, and it is costly to eliminate because of modern legislation in respect of redundancy payments, consultation, minimum periods of notice, etc. Very importantly, overstaffing reduces the competitive efficiency of the business.
Planning staff levels requires that an assessment of present and future needs of the organization be compared with present resources and future predicted resources. Appropriate steps then be planned to bring demand and supply into balance.
Thus the first step is to take a 'satellite picture' of the existing workforce profile (numbers, skills, ages, flexibility, gender, experience, forecast capabilities, character, potential, etc. of existing employees) and then to adjust this for 1, 3 and 10 years ahead by amendments for normal turnover, planned staff movements, retirements, etc, in line with the business plan for the corresponding time frames.
The result should be a series of crude supply situations as would be the outcome of present planning if left unmodified. (This, clearly, requires a great deal of information accretion, classification and statistical analysis as a subsidiary aspect of personnel management.)
What future demands will be is only influenced in part by the forecast of the personnel manager, whose main task may well be to scrutinize and modify the crude predictions of other managers. Future staffing needs will derive from:
· Sales and production... [continues]

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