PERSONNEL PLANNING

Human resources being invaluable to any developmental process for any organisation, the work relating to getting the right type of persons for an organisation is an essential effort. A whole series of activities are involved in this process of assembling a qualified and competent staff. The different activities that help organisations to provide for an adequent number of   competent persons and-to give them continuous facilities to upscale their level of performance to achieve current and future needs of organisational growth are called personnel planning.

While the employees provide the necessary bones and sinews for achieving targeted results, the organisation should also compensate them adequately so that employees' loyalty to the organisation and motivation to give their best to the organisation do not suffer at any point of time. Therefore, all the methods, tools and techniques that establish the smooth and willing participation of the employees in the management of the organisation have to be necessarily based on a well thought out programme. The preparation with the techniques and methods of such well thought out plan would constitute personnel planning.

The ideas and process of planning have to be usefully recapitulated here for putting our discussion on personnel planning in the right perspective. As you already have learnt, planning involves among other things.

• determination of desired goals, and objectives, and setting targets to fit into a time frame;
• an assessment of the future in relation to changes;
• selection of activities, programmes and projects to achieve the set targets;
• an estimation of the resources required to carry out the tasks decided
• preparation of a written plan; and setting a programme of implementation of the plan.