Practical Obstacles to Effective Manpower Planning
| Date | 01 March 1972 |
| Published date | 01 March 1972 |
| DOI | https://doi.org/10.1108/eb055206 |
| Pages | 32-47 |
| Author | Glenn Wellman |
| Subject Matter | HR & organizational behaviour |
GLENN WELLMAN
Glenn
Wellman was
born in 1948 and educated at Aude,
shaw
Grammar
School, and Imperial
College,
University
London, where he gained a BSc in chemistry. Following
this
degree,
he spent two years at the Manchester Busin
School,
specialising
in personnel and finance.
In 1969, he joined the personnel department of Lever
Brothers and worked
as
a
research associate
in
manpower
planning.
At present, he is an investment analyst at
Esso
Petroleum,
engaged
in investment
research
for
Esso
Pen.
Trust.
1 Introduction.
The personnel function has not, in general, been involved in
the high-level strategic decision-taking activities of the firm.
This lack of involvement seems largely to be caused by an in-
ability on the part of the personnel manager to present in-
formation regarding the enterprise in its labour market and
by an inability on the part of general management, to app-
reciate the significance of such information.
This article seeks to show that the human resource inputs
to the enterprise can be modelled stochastically in just the
same way
as
are the technological and capital inputs, and that
these models of
the
factor inputs may be combined, together
with a model of the product market, to produce a model
which will optimise the overall activities of the enterprise.
This article
is
based on research carried out at the Manchester
Business School with the help and supervision of
Mrs.
Enid
Mumford, Senior Lecturer in Industrial Sociology at that
School1.
2 Manpower Planning in the Overall Planning Context.
The personnel manager has traditionally enjoyed only a low
level of prestige in industry and commerce. Such a situation
was inevitable and indeed justified as long as labour was in
plentiful supply and was not a constraining factor-input to
the enterprise. Personnel was seen as a reactive rather than
innovatory managerial function involved in only the low level
decisions of the firm. The concepts of the profession were
consequently insufficiently developed to cope with the new
demands imposed by the need of the firm to work in an en-
vironment where, even allowing for cyclical exceptions, full
employment has become the norm.
The very fact that systems were not and to a great extent are
not generally available to help the firm to explore and work
within the constraints of its labour market indicates that the
claim of personnel to occupy the role of specialists in
technology of the social sciences2 has lacked both crede
and credibility. Rather than devote resources to
research
personnel planning, industry has generally been content
sub-optimise, using OR techniques to make the best of
current situation with personnel providing support in a 'i
fighting' role.
Instead, it should be recognised that labour is a factor-in
as critical to the activities of the enterprise as is capita
vestment and should be accorded a say in the basic high 1
strategic planning of the firm and an appropriately large
D budget. This is not to say that personnel should lose
tactical planning fuction, but rather that this tactical
should exist within an overall strategy which has taken
nisance of the labour market within which the strategy i
be implemented.
3 A Systems Plan for the Resource Allocation Process.
Figure
1
below, illustrates two simplified models of the n
power planning process. Figure la represents manpo
planning
as
it seems to be typically practised, with a react
tactical role assigned to the personnel function which pi
uces a manpower plan which is clearly subordinated to
other plans and can feed back into earlier plans with c
the greatest difficulty. Figure lb by way of contrast, sh
a procedure designed to improve planning efficiency by
empting to optimise all factor inputs simultaneously for
entire enterprise-system.
The enterprise may conveniently be considered as a
high
differentiated open system3 interacting with many
diffr-
ent aspects of its environment. These interactions must
be investigated if we are to build a realistic model of the f
for planning
purposes.
As
in
all
management science, the c
lity of
the
output is directly controlled by the quality of
inputs and the model.
32
Practical Obstacles to Effective
Manpower Planning
Glenn Wellman
The remainder of this paper will be concerned with exploring
the aspects of such a procedure which are of specific and
direct concern to the personnel specialist. These aspects may
be grouped under three headings:
a) The interaction of labour and capital factor-inputs in the
production function, governing DEMAND for LABOUR.
b) The interaction of the firm with its labour market, gov-
erning the SUPPLY of LABOUR.
c) The interaction of a), b) and the corporate objectives in
the OPTIMISING MODEL.
4 The Demand for Labour in the Enterprise.
The demand for labour is a derived demand, the level of
which is a function of the demand for the goods or services
which the enterprise supplies and is moderated by the tech-
nology employed and the organisation of the tasks in the
workplace4 .
This relationship has been expressed5 in the general form:
K = f(Xi,Yj) subject to Zk,
where K is the expected employment of manpower
resources
Xi is the product demand
Yj represents the moderating variables
ZK
represents the constraints of budget, lab-
our market etc.
Now the relative marginal productivities of capital and labour
have been rigorously discussed at the macro-economic level,
for which production functions have been developed, not-
ably the Cobb-Douglas function6, which takes the form:
P = a.Lk.C1-k (0≤ k ≤1)
where p represents production
a,k are constants
L represent labour factor input
C represents capital factor input
Little work has been done, however, at the level of the firm.
Such work as has been done has concentrated on the analy-
33
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