Strategic Staffing: A Comprehensive System for Effective Workforce Planning - Softcover

Bechet, Thomas P.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0814433014 ISBN 13: 9780814433010

Publisher: Amacom, 2008

Synopsis

Co-published with SHRM. Many organizations understand the benefits of a longer-term approach to staffing: reduced turnover and hiring costs, improved efficiency and morale, and ultimately greater profits. Unfortunately, traditional approaches to strategic staffing are often more effective on paper than in the workplace. Strategic Staffing: Second Edition shows how to identify staffing needs and opportunities through qualitative and quantitative measures, and presents several effective, nontraditional approaches to strategic staffing. Bechet includes factors as diverse as promotions, retirements, "decruiting" (the active management of staff out of an organization), termination, and even retention. Featuring full case studies and dozens of examples, the book is both enlightening and practical. And to help readers create their own staffing plans, the companion site has holds a trove of invaluable tools, including: · PowerPoint(TM) slide presentations · Customizable Excel(TM) spreadsheets * Assessment and evaluation forms · Calculations and analyses · Sample staffing plans, and much more. Integrating a strategic approach to staffing can result in reduced turnover and hiring costs, improved efficiency and morale, and ultimately greater profits. This book is a detailed, process-oriented guide that offers all the tools staffing professionals need.

About this title

From the Inside Flap

Most organizations state some version of the philosophy that “our people are our most important asset.” But surprisingly few companies actually incorporate strategy into their staffing initiatives, or vice versa. Given that organizations are the sums of their people, a company whose business strategy does not view workforce planning as a direct driver of success is merely paying lip service to a tired mantra. Worse, that company is likely wasting a lot of money, time, and effort on staffing initiatives that focus on filling positions instead of complementing business objectives.

Strategic Staffing presents a proven, repeatable, start-to-finish system for transforming the way your company identifies and meets its staffing needs. This is not a book about how to put great talent in specific jobs, but rather a comprehensive guide to designing integral talent strategies that are part and parcel of how your company makes money.

Staffing is not just hiring people; it’s anything that relates to getting people into, around, and/or out of an organization in a planned way. Staff planning then includes hiring, retaining, moving, or letting go employees, or any combination, and by planning your moves in relation to a given period (say, a fiscal year) or a business milestone (e.g., when the Denver office opens), you’ve taken them out of the HR vacuum and into the dynamic of your business.

As you look at potential alignments between business objectives and staffing initiatives, you’ll use Bechet’s detailed numeric models to figure out exactly how many people you’ll need, in what roles, over the course of the initiative, and to determine when and where to fill gaps or eliminate surpluses. His step-by-step examples and the finished, specific staffing plans that result offer eye-opening proof that “people issues” can (and must) be quantified. Project summaries and three detailed case studies illustrate how real organizations developed and used strategic approaches to address their own staffing issues.

Remember, developing the right strategic staffing process won’t help if that process is implemented incorrectly. The basis for effective implementation is the context in which your workforce planning takes place. Strategic Staffing gives you a detailed framework in which to place and develop staffing initiatives, and a powerful diagnostic sequence with which to determine the ideal implementation for your company’s specific needs. You’ll also get:

· A detailed and clear form for evaluating your current staffing processes and finding opportunities to improve or adapt them.

· Ideas for bringing line managers into the strategic staffing process, and an interview guide for defining staffing issues and requirements.

· Specific explanations for structuring your human resources department to optimally support strategic staffing.

· Suggestions for what to include on a strategic staffing website, a powerful resource that employees can access through your company’s intranet.

Strategic Staffing also has a companion website featuring spreadsheets, PowerPoint presentations, and other invaluable tools to use in creating, modifying, implementing, and maintaining your workforce planning strategy.

So don’t let your company simply “talk the talk” about the value of people. Quantify it, maximize it, and leverage it toward substantial and sustained growth with Strategic Staffing.

Thomas P. Bechet is the founder and principal of Bechet Consulting, which helps client companies develop and execute workforce planning strategies. He was previously a partner with the Walker Group and spent eight years with Towers Perrin and its general management consulting division, Cresap. He has served as chairman and as a member of the board of directors of the Professional Development Committee of the Human Resource Planning Society. He teaches in the University of Michigan’s Executive Education program.

From the Back Cover

The problem with most staffing plans is that they look a lot better on paper than in the real world of your business. Human resources professionals and even line managers and department heads often plot out hiring initiatives without regard for the company’s business goals.

Staffing can’t be done in a vacuum; there is no one-size-fits-all plan to magically drive business outcomes. But what if your company’s workforce planning strategy could practically guarantee greater efficiency, reduced turnover, lower staffing costs, and long-term growth?

Introducing the second edition of Tom Bechet’s Strategic Staffing, the only book that offers not just general ideas but real, quantifiable approaches for aligning your workforce plan­ning initiatives with business goals. When you build teams, departments, and divisions around organizational objectives, rather than shoehorning those objectives around the people you already have, you are truly optimizing the impact of your human resources.

Featuring eight all-new chapters and significant updates and revisions throughout, the new edition provides step-by-step instructions and powerful tools for accurately identi­fying and addressing staffing needs within the context of what your organization is trying to do. Coupled with a companion website accessible with the purchase of the book, Strategic Staffing gives you:

· Detailed, numeric diagnostic instruments that will help you develop a fully realized staffing plan

· Customizable Excel spreadsheets and PowerPoint presentations

· Dozens of clear examples, plus three full, real-world case studies of strategic staffing in action

As enlightening and inspiring as it is concrete and practical, Strategic Staffing is a powerful, process-oriented guide that takes you all the way through a workforce planning initiative custom-tailored to your company—and designed for maximum results.

Edition details

• Publisher: Amacom
• Publication date: 2008
• ISBN 10: 0814433014
• ISBN 13: 9780814433010
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Edition number: 2
• Number of pages: 352