Strategic Human Resources Planning in Healthcare

 

Strategic Human Resources Planning

Executive summary

A family group of companies dealing in pharmaceuticals has been in operation for decades distributing medical supplies such as syringes and bandages to different hospitals in their region. The company has established a reputation for itself, owing to the quality products and reliable services it offers the local hospitals. The company’s success over the years can be attributed to its dedicated team of employees that has established a family like environment for its staff ensuring prolonged retention of its employees. The company also attributes its success to a dedicated customer satisfaction policy, which went to great lengths to ensure the needs of their customers are satisfied. The company’s experience has grown over the years and with it, there has been a development in growth of their business network, whereby, the company supplies its products to hundreds of hospitals across Canada that has seen it open branches in different locations across the country.

Background of Management/ Problem Statement

Over the years, the business has been under the stewardship of the founders, who are mainly members of the same family. Being a small company only serving local hospitals, the company has experienced nothing but success among its workforce. However, with the expansion of company and the ever-changing technologies in medical field continues creating need for change not only in the products the company supplies but also in staff and management approaches. These changes have led the company to promote some of their existing staff or hire new ones to meet the demands in the changing market. Nonetheless, the company’s human resources department is clouded with issues as the role of the department has grown to more than an amateur department for a small company. The troubled HR department is now experiencing staff departures and falling earnings. As such, the company needs to establish a human resource strategy to help create a balance between the employee and employer needs ensuring sustainability of the business in the end.

Project Stakeholders Roles and Responsibilities

Managing Director

Bill seats at the top of the company management chain, he owns the company and thus, all decisions that are made for the organization will need his blessing before they can be put into play.

Project Directors

These different directors within the company plan direct and oversee different projects ensuring the deliverables are reached as defined in the project goals. The directors also maintain accountability for the management of the company resources assigned to the project.

Quality Managers

They manage products and the process quality activities of the different project and offer an insight of the project health by offering a review of the process, product activities, and the required standards. Therefore, quality managers are vital to the human resources department especially towards activities of training needs analysis, training, hiring of skilled staff.

Employees

Employees are an important part of implementing change within an organization, since the changes to be implemented will mainly affect them directly. Therefore, as part of creating a strategic human resource plan, it will be important to seek what changes the

employees would like to see, be it technological, managerial, work schedules, and other workplace related issues influencing productivity.

Operations Lead

These are the individuals mandated with the overseeing of different operations of a new system, as well as monitoring and managing operations and resolutions of operations support issues. The operations leads are an important part of change within the organization, as they will play a key role towards implementing new management software that is needed for the human resource department.

Approaches to Solving the Human Resources Issues

Labor Relations

According to Noe et al (2006), worker labor relations are dedicated to endorsing operative fairness, and specialized associations between a corporation and its personnel. Through effective labor relations, the company will be able to solve various problems it is faced with including among others establishing awell-organizedfabrication of goods. At the same time, the labor relations will allow a determination of satisfactory terms and circumstances of service considering both the good of the proprietor, personnel, and as well as the society via agreements reached through negations. Thus, strategic plan to use labor relations will establish stable and harmonious relations between the Family Company and its employees, and between them and their society.

Labor relations also go a long way towards establishing mechanisms of communication within the organization. In addition, the practice establishes channels of consultation and collaboration to determine workplace matters at the industrial level through agreed harmony. The family company is faced with numerous disputes between its management and the employees, labor relations can be used to mitigate these disputes to aid in the settlement and future avoidance through negotiations and dispute settlement mechanisms. The process would go a long way towards the provision of social protection where it might be needed especially in areas of social security, child labor, safety, and health (Noe et al, 2006).

Talent Management and Staff Development

The organization has been in constant need of a human resource assistant to deal with growing workforce and ensure the needs and work schedules of the employees are in order. This objective could be attained through talent management in the company. According to McCauley and Wakefield (2006), capacity supervision is assignment critical procedure that sees to it that an organization has the quality and amount of individuals in place to meet their existing and impending business urgencies. In line with this staff development process, the company will cover all the key aspects of the employee’s life covering the selection process, the growth, succession, and the management of performances.

The Family Medical Group Company can thus have talent management as part of their human resource strategic plan ensuring the human resource department always has a clear understanding of the organization’s prevailing and future operational strategies. The organization will also from time to time be able to identify any gaps arising between the current talent and that required to attain business success. In addition, running a talent management plan will ensure the firm is accurate in hiring and promotions decisions it undertakes. Finally, the human resources team will easily connect individual goals to corporate goals providing organizational expectations and offer feedback to aid manage performance (McCauley and Wakefield, 2006).

Work Design/ Classification

Organizations can employ the high relationship prevailing between employee satisfaction with the work environment, which includes the rules, technology in use, and the office design to attain organizational success. Where new employees join the company, design can be employed to ease transition to the new work environment for the new employee and enhance productivity. Under the work design, the firm should get rid of disruptions and offer its employees a comfortable environment that support their needs in the process transforming attitudes about work and increase output and efficiency (Enz and Siguaw, 2000).

The company’s revenues have been decreasing, for the human resources department to save this situation, it has to maximize the intellectual capital and to do this, it has to establish effective work processes, and through an environment, that supports it. According to do Enz and Siguaw(2000), where an efficient work environment has been created and the staffs are proud of it, then consequently job performances improve. In addition, work environments that are known to adopt work designs that are supportive of the way people need to work, it strengthens morale and promotes a positive attitude about their duties and enhances productivity.

Performance Management

This is a procedure of fashioning workplace setting where individuals can accomplish tasks to the best of their capacities. Thus, performance management commences when the job is defined as needed. The process is a collaboration between the employer and employees making major interaction opportunity with the employees a learning occasion. Developing a performance management plan is vital to the human resources department of the firm since it contributes establishing an employee recruitment plan, allowing the firm to recruit potential employees in the process.

Implementing a performance management plan will bring various advantages including creating job specification and it aligns the firm’s strategic organization and culture, offers an accurate picture of the different employees’ performances. The process will also make for collaborative process geared towards setting goals and review performances following a two-way communication channel between the firm and its staff. The plan will monitor and measure results and behaviors, including issuing feedback on the different tasks carried out with the firm. Where there are, training needs, the plan creates training and development opportunities, and most importantly, it identifies areas of poor performance and establishes plans to improve these areas (Den Hartog et al, 2004).

Organization Development

According to Cummings and Worley (2014), where organizational development is part of a strategic human resources the organization will benefit by further strengthening its leadership capabilities of the firm’s supervisory personnel. Organization Development will increase the organization’s capacity to a well manage assortment and identify natural differences that exist at the workstation, the process will go a long way towards employees’ skills, create accountability, and offer resources that will enable the organization create long-term sustainable change.

The process of organizational development will help reduce the staff turnover rate, work on the low staff morale reported by the managers, fight the prevailing inability to effectively communicate throughout the organization, and work on the disconnection between the supervision and the staff. In addition, organization development will play a part to train employees for career development, providing flexible learning options by encouraging employees to engage self-learning and engage in development activities, and build trust between the staff and the leadership in the organization. The plan will also help the human resources department in matching the various available learning options to different learning styles (Cummings and Worley, 2014).

Training Needs Analysis

According to Brown (2002), operative training needs analysis is predominantly important in the modern day changing work environment as new machineries and elastic working performance are prevalent, that correspond to changes in the skills and abilities. Training needs analysis will enable the firm to station funds into the zones where they will underwrite to the expansion and enhancing drive among the employees. As well, the employees will need to be trained to bridge the existing skill gap and training needs analysis is important for an effective training program. Through training needs analysis, the organization will be able to channel its available resources to areas where they will be able to contribute to employee development in the process enhancing productivity at the workplace.

Ensuring training needs analysis is part of the strategic human resource plan will ensure the organization priorities are put into consideration and economies of scale are attained. Additionally, the firm will have an opportunity to consider its future needs, and develop monitoring techniques to use within the organization. The investigation will help the organization to investigate unexpected problems and indicate where gaps exist within the organization. This part of the plan will aid in establishing the level of need, and come up with a plan to mitigate the need by considering the kind of training that will be most appropriate (Brown, 2002).

Staff Acquisition

The top management in the firm will negotiate with functional and department managers to identify and assign resources in line with the firm’s project organization structure. In addition, the plan will identify external sources and mechanisms to hire new project sources, and allow an approval of the project works. The upgrade of the management system will include alliancing with the vendor, in corroboration with the human resource management team. Nonetheless, the vendor will need to transfer his expertise to the staff to ensure the transition of the project transpires (Brown, 2002).

Conclusion

The strategic human resource plan will go a long way in helping the Family Medical Group of Companies archive its goals. The process will act as the link between the management of the organization and the overall strategic plan of the plan. The strategic plan will aid the organization in meeting their mission, help the organization assess the current human resource capacities, foresee the requirement of the organization, analyze gaps, and come up with strategies that support organization strategies.

References

Brown, J. (2002). Training needs assessment: A must for developing an effective               training

program. Public personnel management, 31(4), 569-578.

Cummings, T. G., & Worley, C. G. (2014). Organization development and change.              Cengage learning.

Den Hartog, D. N., Boselie, P., & Paauwe, J. (2004). Performance management: A               model

and research agenda. Applied psychology, 53(4), 556-569.

Enz, C. A., & Siguaw, J. A. (2000). Best practices in human resources. The Cornell Hotel

and Restaurant Administration Quarterly, 41(1), 48-61.

McCauley, C., & Wakefield, M. (2006).Talent management in the 21st century: Help               your

company find, develop, and keep its strongest workers. The Journal for Quality and

Participation, 29(4), 4.

Noe, R. A., Hollenbeck, J. R., Gerhart, B., & Wright, P. M. (2006).Human resource               management: Gaining a competitive advantage.