Use of Manpower Audit for Efficient Man Power Planning

USE OF MANPOWER AUDIT FOR EFFICIENT MAN POWER PLANNING (A CASE STUDY OF ENUGU STATE BROADCASTING SERVICE)

MEANING AND PURPOSE OF MANPOWER AUDIT

All organisation whether public or private needs the use of manpower audit for effective manpower planning.  This implies that for an organisation to stand the test of time, it must employ the use of manpower audit for effective manpower planning.

However, in recognition of the dynamic nature of business environment and other prevailing circumstances, there is need for continuous evaluation of human resource.

According to Hannagan 1990, human resources audit lists the abilities, performances, records and apparent potential of each of the organisation and its employees.

Also Walter 1980 is of the view that manpower audit provides a comprehensive perspective on current practices, resources management and identifies opportunities and strategies for redirecting these implicit is an assumption that opportunities are current approaches and that the human resource management processes is dynamic and must be redirected to be responsive to needs.

 

MANAGEMENT AUDIT AS A PERQUISITE FOR MANPOWER PLANNING

Pigors and Myers, (1969, p.57) stated categorically that manpower audit or replacement is simply a convenient way of summarizing that kind of information that chief executive and the manager and staff unit of the organisation need to have for advance manpower planning.

However, Pratt and Benniet (1990; 9.102 – 107) made it clear that from the outset it is essential to stress that the manpower planning does not form a discrete function and must of necessity be linked to the organisation broad objective.  It is a dynamic process that must be subjected to constant review and the methodology presented below is likely to fit neatly to every organisation plan.  It is usual to consider the macro and micro levels separately and also the supply and demand aspects.

However, any separation is purely for facility of analysis and all aspect are of course closely interrelated.

A manpower planning group that will handle specialists and line managers from various section of the organisation will  have to cover the following seven interrelated areas of activity of ‘steeps’ towards creating the manpower plan.

  1. Manpower objective as part of corporate plan.
  2. Manpower audit (external) an assessment of the external environment with regard to labour marketing etc.
  3. Manpower audit (internal) the number and categories of present employees productivity mobility, wastages.
  4. Supply forecasting.
  5. Demand forecasting
  6. Implementation
  7. Control

It should be stressed from the outset that manpower planning is only an integral part of the overall corporate planning process and is in no way independent.  Any objectives regarding manpower will therefore be interrelated with these concerning such things as capital expenditure, marketing, reorganization, diversification and of course, financial forecast.

Feedback

Adapted from Pigors and Myers, personnel administration 1969 p.58.

Although considerately simplified the diagram clearly illustrate the integration of manpower considerations with the corporate plan and the interaction of supply and demand upon personnel policies that must in turn be concerterated into specific programmers.  This feedback “loop” is intended to highlight the dynamic nature of manpower planning.

Difficulties in producing the right numbers and quality of staff at the right time will obviously affect the operation of the organisation.

Corporation objectives may have to be altered in the light of this feedback in order to redress any imbalance in human resources requirements.  The days when manpower resources were expected to adjust to business demands through recruitment or redundancy are gone.  Manpower consideration will often take the lead nowadays instead of reading to events.  For example, difficulties with staff retraining may affect the timing of the introduction of new technology or a particular work system.

Industrial relations problems may equally cause management to adjust plans for reducing production capacity in a particular plant.

MANPOWER AUDIT – EXTERNAL

The national labour market is extremely dynamic and much statistical information is available concerning many factors of employment.

However, the reliability and relevance of this date must be assessed by the individual organisation.

Generally, we have an ageing labour force that contains an increasing number of female working and enjoys a reducing number of working hours and longer holiday, we are also experiencing the paradox of simultaneous unemployment and labour shortage.  The later being predominantly in skilled occupations.

Demographic forecast also suggest that the number of school leavers will reduce significantly in 1990’s, adding to the problems of employers.  These natural factors will have an obvious bearing upon the potential supply of labour, and most be fully consider.  However in order to assess the more immediate to consider factors, that are local to the organisation.  Local studies will assume extra importance when considering expansion, or removal to another area, items such as population density, competition for labour and current employment levels should be carefully assessed at the planning stage.

Despite high level of unemployment in recent years, employers have been forced to recruit in remote parts of the country owing to shortages of skilled labour in vicinity of their establishment particularly of the south east.

 

MANPOWER AUDIT – INTERNAL

Although the external audit is conducted mainly with a view to the supply situation, the internal audit will be used in determining both supply and demand within the frame work of the corporate plan, it should be possible to use management information in order to carryout a much more through audit than that of the external situation.  What then are the aspects of the human resources that need to be analyzed.

 

AGE

The age distribution of the workforce is critical for such matters as recruitment, training promotion, sickness, absenteeism, wastage etc.  An aging workforce may provide benefits of maturity and experience, but these can be offset by reeducation in physical effectiveness and innovation, not to mention a lack of succession

A mainly young workforce may not pass the department of experience necessary for a stable organisation.

In times of contribution, an order workforce will allow natural wastage through retirement, whereas sales led organisation may require a young active workforce.

A simple age distributing graph is given below.

200

150

100

50      20      30      40      50      60      70

Adapted from Pigors and Myers personnel administration 1969 p.61

In the graph, it is apparent that the organisation has predominantly young or old employees with considerable fewer in the middle age ranges.

This could suggest a succession lap that may require remedial measures in the areas of recruitment retraining etc.  In order to utilize this data for full analysis of the internal supply situation it will have to be supplemented with further management information.

SKILL ANALYSIS

If age distribution data is to be meaningful, it will be necessary to use more discrete graphic than that described above.  These should indicate the age distribution of specific occupation or departments.  The data will then be presented in a form that management can more easily appreciate and act upon of itself, a basic skill inventory will be invaluable to management and any personnel records system work it’s salt should readily provide details of the skills and attributes of each employee.

However, this information will require updating and staff appraisal would provide one opportunity for this.

This underscores the word of directors of schools in Imo State.  Okoroafor (1988 p. 15) made its understand that Imo State government spends over N200million annually on wages and salaries of its 40,000 teachers serving in the 2,012 primary and 427 post primary school in the state.

He said, that the state schools management board had embarked on an annual appraisal of the performances of school heads to ensure that only competent school administrators were accorded the privilege of heading of school.

That was the reason why the seminar which theme is continuous professional growth and development was organized, aimed at updating the skills and competences of school heads.

 

PROMOTION AND TRANSFER

Although promotion and transfer are used by management as part of an employee development programme and for motivational purposes, they will also have a major bearing upon the succession needs of the organisation despite the fact that employee expectations are often tempered by existing practice.  It is for management to study pas promotion patterns and try to predict whether or not any changes will affect the internal supply situation.  Here again, quantitative information is essential in order to assess potential for promotion at various levels.

An essential part of any external manpower audit is an assessment of the productivity of the labour force.  This can be achieved through basic work study techniques and comparisons with other organisations.

The information obtained can then be used as part of the overall planning process and will obviously affect management policies regarding or retaining mechanization etc apart from the human relations aspects and the industrial relating implication.

In Useni (1997; p.2) the minister of federal capital territory (FCT).  Lt Gen. Jeremiah Useni gave directors in the ministry a one month ultimatum to compile the list of redundant workers in their various departments for retrenchment.

Addressing some directors and senior officials of the ministry in Abuja at the weekend, Useni charged all directors to take inventory of those considered “active and effective” from the “redundant and inactive” ones.

He expressed regret that the federal capital territory administration spent over N30 million monthly on staff salaries, pointing out that the output of the workers was too low from the huge amount committed to their welfare.

There is no need to retain this large number of workers who just roam about the ministry’s premises doing nothing.

 

COST

Manpower planning cannot take place in a vacuum with little or no regard for the economic facts of life.

In order to satisfy financial criteria in detail these could be broken down under various headings.

Recruitment cost

Training cost

Cost of remuneration, sub-divided into basic pay, overtime etc

Fring benefits.

Accommodation and other ‘on’ costs such as persons, sports, facilities, canteens car par etc.

Personnel administration costs

Relocation and severance costs.

TURNOVER

Turnover, more correctly wastage analysis has received a great deal of attention from manpower planners.

The statistical possibilities are enormous, but apart from these, analysis is important for practical reasons.  Wastage upon many management strategies, such as recruitment, training and promotion.

It is probably well at the outset deal with the semantic problems.  “Wastage” is often confused with turnover.

Wastage only deals with severance, turnover embraces the whole recruitment – promotion severance process.

An early and important series of empirical studies were carried out by the tail stock institute of the glacier metal company.

PURPOSE OF MANPOWER AUDIT

Stranses and Sayles (1960, p:321 – 322) personnel’s audit functions sited three basic purposes.

TO MAKE SURE POLICIES ARE IMPLEMENTED

Prorogation of policies is easier than to generate their executive.

Example, the KELLER COMPANY claimed with pride that all it’s promotions were based on merit alone, without regard for length of service. Management was convinced that this was the case until a recent personnel survey indicated that senior white men, despite a strong affirmative action policies, filled over eighty percent of all promotions.

Auditing procedures help to reveal the extent to which policies are followed. Top management normally takes actions only when serious crisis occur.

Generally, management is too engrossed in every day problem to identify the gradual erosion of  standards, which will eventually create a serious crisis. A regular program of auditing helps management to dedect significant trends before they become crisis when problem solving is much more difficult and makes the entire control process less threatening.

When management steps in during the real crisis tempers are short, executives are under stress and every one is characterized by fear and resentment.

TO MAXIMIZE COST EFFECTIVENESS

Personnel programs can be very costly and too often organizations accept the value of such programs entirely in good faith.

Examples: the American computer company adopted a liberal educational leave policy. All engineers with two years of service could obtain a one-year leave of absence from the company to take courses leading to an advanced degree. If the supervisor certified that such courses will contribute to the job effectiveness, the employees were paid full tuition fee and expenses and continued on half salary for the year. Personnel surveyed the cost and returns from the program cost over and 2 million annually of the more than six hundred employees who had leave policy, more than half had left the company. These findings cost the management to revaluate the programs.

No wonder, Awowede 1997 p; 30 states that the belly of broad street rumbled last weed as news of a massive retrenchment by united Bank for Africa plc. (U.B.A), hit the nations prime financial district.

Though the banks management refused to say how many staffs that was affected. Till reliable source unit that the number is as high as 3,200 which comes to almost as high as 50 percent of the UBA’s 700 plus workforce.

The exercise also cuts across various cadres and branches, affecting mainly older staffs some of whom have put in about 20 to 30 years. A source said, however some relatively new staff could not deliver on their target were also affected.

Ogie Eboibe, the bank’s principle manager, corporate affaris, who spoke with the magazine said that the exercise was designed to shell the bank of excess fat and strengthen it’s competitive capacity.

As this cases illustrate, the alert oganisation constanly re- evaluates it’s personnel program to make sure it gets the most value for it’s money.

Further, since most personnel objective can be achieved by a variety of techniques ( cost effective recruitment may require that many money be spent on training). The personnel department must continually compare the cost and benefit of each.

 ALERT TOP MANAGEMENT WHEN POLICIES SHOULD BE CHANGED.

Personnel had to counter the tendency of line managers to ignore the human relation implication of their actions managers are always under multiple pressures from a variety of sources especially from their boss to meet budgets, schedules, reduce waste et. And under this pressure they find it easy to forget the potential reactions of the employees or to neglect the larger impact of today’s decision.

Personnel, because of it’s unique perspective, sensitivities and contrast can identify trends requiring new or modified policies.

  STEPS IN HUMAN RESOURCE AUDIT

The steps that are involved in manpower audit are as follows.

  1. A planning meeting involving all key staff personnel’s and senior managers: here the audit procedure is tailored to address issues felt to be important.
  2. Examination of pertinent available information including personnel data, computer capabilities, managerial and employer menual guide-book, appraisal forms and materials relevants.
  3. Interviews with key managers from operating units, key staff divisions senior executives (optional) to pinpoint issues concering present strengths anticipated needs and managerial philosophies regarding human resources.
  4. Additional information such as business plans, budgets, appraised data and compensation data may be useful in investigating issues identified as warranting consideration in planning for future needs.
  5. The various inputs are synthesized to present an integrated picture of current activities, priority, staff resources and the problems identified as criteria for assessing human resource priorities and specific programs are proposed.

 

  • APPROACHES TO EVALUATION OF THE HUMAN RESOURCES AUDIT.

Invancwich and Gluect (1983 p. 649-661) viewed evaluation of the human resource management functions as a systematic formal experience designed to measure the cost and benefits of total human resource management programs and to compare it’s efficiency and effectiveness with the organizations past performance. The performance of comparable enterprise and enterprise objective.

 

EVALUATION OF HUMAN RESOURCE MANAGEMENT IS PERFORMED FOR THESE PURPOSES.

  1. To justify human resource management existence and budget.
  2. To improve the human resources management function by providing a means to decide when to drop activities and when to end them.
  3. To provide feedback from employees and operating managers on human resources management and effectiveness.
  4. To help human resource management do it part to achieve the organizational objective.

To management’s parting the personnel audit is to insist that all aspects of the organization be evaluated and to establish the general philosophy of evaluation. The human resource management department is often involved in designing the audit.

The operating manager’s rule is to help in gathering the data and to help evaluate other functions and users of resources in the organization.

STATISTICAL APPROACH TO EVALUATION

The most frequent used formal evaluation method and those that examine the work of organisation’s employment statistics and analyze them.

The statistical approach can be much more sophisticated than check list. The statistics gathered and compared to some other yard stick of measurement. The reason for the statistics is that it indicates where to being to look foe evaluation problems.

The raw data of such reports are interesting themselves and can provide some input to evaluation, most organizations that perform evaluation, however, analyse those data by the use of ratios and similar ratio are computed for an organization, they can be compared to similar organisation’s ratios.

The statistical approaches used most frequently consider turnover, absenteeism, grievances, attitude surveys and other measures of effectiveness and statistical analysis of the human resources managements department itself.

EVALUATION OF TURNOVER

          Turnover is the net result of the exit of some employees and entrance of others to the work or organization.

Turnover can be quite costly to in employer, one estimate is that it cost American industry S 11 billion a year.

The cost of replacing a single non – management employee’s has been estimated at over S2,500. the cost of turnover include, increased cost for social security and unemployment compensation terminal vacations, severance pay, under utilized facilities until the replacement is hired, employment cost as recruiting expenses, interview and moving expenses and administration cost of notification and payroll changes obviously there is also a loss of productivity until the new employee reaches the performance level of the one who left the job.

All turnover is not a net loss, however, employees who are not contributing to organizational effectiveness should be retained or delivered. The employer has no control over some turnovers.

A student husband or wife, for example may work until graduation and then go away.

There are several quantitative methods for computing turnovers.

Some of the traditional formulations are:-

  1. Separation rate =No of separation during the month x 100 Total no of employees at mid month
  1. Quit rate =Total quits x 100

Average workforce.

  1. Avoidable turnover =Total separation – unavailable x 100

Average workforce.

Formular:

  • Is the most general and does the department of labour recommend the one
  • Tries to isolate a difficult type of turnover .
  • Is the most refined. It eliminate quite by these group that can be expected to level part turners and women for maternity reasons. These data can be defined further by length of employment, by job classification by job category and each organization unit.

EVALUATION OF ABSENCE

Absenteeism is failure of employees to report for work when they are scheduled to work.

Absenteeism is undesirable because of it’s cost and the operating problems it casues.

It is estimated that 400 million work days are lost per year in the united states due to absenteeism.

This is about 5.1 days per employee in many countries absenteeism runs as high as 10 – 20 percent of the work force on any given day. Combining the average number of workdays cost per year with an estimate of daily cost of non- managerial absenteeism per worker S66, including wages, fringe benefits and loss in productivity yield on annual cost of about S26.4.

The standard formula for computing of absenteeism is no of employee day through job

Absence in the period x 100

Average no of employee x number of work days. Moste others use a variation of this formula such as. Total hour of absence x 100

Total hours worked (or scheduled)

EVALUATION OF COMPLAINTS AND GRIEVANCES

A compliant is a statement in written or oral form of dissatisfaction or criticism by an employee to manager.

A grievance is a compliant which has beer presented formally and in writing to a management or union official.

A compliant/grievance rate and the serverity of the grievance is another was too evaluate human resource management function. Nevertheless an increase in the rate and severity of complaints and grievances can indicate dissatifaction, which inturn might lead to increase in absenteeism and turnover. Both factors indicate how successful the human resource management department is in securing productivity and satisfaction for the employees.

Statistically analysis of complaints and grievances have not been done as scientifically as for turnover and absenteeism.

 

2.4 COMMUNICATION AUDIT RESULT

Personnel is responsible for directing higher managements attention to trouble spot in the field of human relations and help to develop remedial actions.

In order to function effectively, personnel department employee must enjoy a working relationship with the line officials who institute changes. If  this relationship doesn’t exist, the staff can prepare any number of lengthy reports and analysis, but most will be ignored.

Successful industrial relations personnel have learned that they can improved line performance more effectively if they discuss the results of their evaluations with supervisors involved before sending them to higher management.

This gives the supervisors a chance to improve their performance before their boss learns that they are doing poor job. The staff report, no longer a pressure mechanism becomes a device to help the supervisor remedy defects in the operation and meet standard established by the management.

When most of the problems uncovered by the staff investigation are remedied without resource to higher lever of the organization, it will be noticed that staff and line groups work together harmoniously.

Personnel should involved line managers from the beginning of the data tethering and interpretation process. Line should help to determine how data should be collected and disseminated.

At times personnel may pass data unto the managers concerned, letting facts speak for themselves. Alternatively, the data can be used as a sprig board for supervisory training. If supervisors are encouraged to interpret the data, they will accept their own interpretations. Line managers will also be more wiling to accept a staff control report if it is presented at the proper time and this will help them achieve certain objective.

2.5     MANPOWER AUDIT IN ENUGU STATE BROADCASTING SERVICE (ESBS)

          Manpower audit in Enugu State Broadcasting Service provide an avenue through wish the image of the service could be improved and attract effective performance of the workforce usually based on analyzing systems or principles in the personnel management.

Furthermore, manpower as a reliable tool for the evaluation of the management performance and the level of efficiency.

In Enugu State Broadcasting Service manpower audit has it’s effect and defect as a major tool.

The effect of bad manpower audit in Enugu State Broadcasting Service can be over staffing or under staffing or in some cases recruitment of skills that are not required in the organization. High talented managers are indeed among the company’s most important assets for audit. There is need for manpower audit for effective manpower planning program.

In every organization for example in Enugu settled lone-term employee.The three phases are not always neatly distinguishable and the scales used for plotting the graph could vary the emphasis upon each one.

However, they do generally illustrate the situation that occurs in most organizations. Despite the fact that many mathematical models have been based upon the well established unitary induction arising model, more recent studies have identified multiple induction crisis situation within some organization.

The lesson would appear to be that the relationship between length of service to leaving is of obvious importance to management. However it is for each organization to analyse it’s own data in order to highlight any idiosyncrasies.

PURPOSE OF MANPOWER AUDIT

Stranses and Sayles (1960, p; 322) personnel’s audit functions sited three basic purposes.

TO MAKE SOURCE POLICIES ARE IMPLEMENTED

Promogation of policies is easier than to generate their execution.Example, the KELLER company claimed with pride that all its promotions were basied on merit alone, without regard for length of service management was convinced that this was the case until a recent personnel survey indicated that senior white men, despite a strong affirmative action polices, filled over eighty percent of

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