Happy staff are a boon to every organization. They’re more productive and motivated, and create a more pleasant working atmosphere in the workplace. Effective personnel management ensures that staff continually work on their professional development, while keeping both individual and organizational objectives aligned.
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So, what’s personnel management?
Personnel management is the part of HR management that focuses on recruiting, selecting, and training staff in a way that helps you take your organization to a higher level. It also addresses how best to retain top talent within your organization.
Supporting staff is one of the key aspects of personnel management because staff are your organization’s most valuable asset. That’s why it’s important they’re satisfied and have access to all the tools and resources they need to perform to the best of their abilities.
Three types of personnel management
Personnel management is a process you can view or approach from one of several angles. Broadly speaking, we’ve identified three types of personnel management – strategic, tactical, and operational.
1. Strategic personnel management
Strategic personnel management primarily focuses on current and future staffing needs. Are your current personnel policies working?
Key factors to examine include recruitment policy, current staff turnover, and employee satisfaction levels. Based on this information, you can predict your short- and long-term staffing requirements.
2. Tactical personnel management
Tactical personnel management focuses primarily on developing and planning all your organization’s staffing resources:
- planning staffing levels & schedules – based on quantitative and qualitative demand for human resources and available competences
- updating long-term staffing plans – creating frameworks for staff recruitment, selection, and training
- structuring staff resources – organic, functional (job assessment, employment conditions, remuneration system, etc.), and technical (tools and other HR instruments)
3. Operational personnel management
Operational personnel management focuses primarily on support functions or the processes relating to staff influx, for example recruitment, selection, onboarding, continued professional development, etc.
Examples include:
- setting up recruitment & selection process workflows
- creating and maintaining staff records
- managing medical examinations (if applicable)
- issuing IDs, tools, vehicles, etc.
What’s more, all staffing investments and continued professional development (CPD) activities also form part of operational personnel management.
Examples include:
- education & training
- performance reviews & assessment interviews
- career advice
- sickness & leave schemes
- timekeeping & timesheets
- salary processing
- termination processes
The objectives of personnel management
Personnel management aims to achieve several key objectives, but its main goal is to create a working environment in which staff can perform to the best of their abilities.
1. Acquiring and putting knowledge and skills into use
Personnel management is a tool you can use to help you put the right people in the right place at the right time and transform your company into a learning organization that has a competitive edge and is ready for the future.
2. Creating engagement
You can use personnel management to help you create greater engagement in several ways, for example with fair remuneration schemes, good fringe benefits, and opportunities for training and professional/personal development.
3. Working more efficiently
Operational processes are often far from optimal in many organizations because you have the wrong people working in the wrong place at the wrong time, or because you’re wasting time, money, and valuable resources. Personnel management can help you rectify these issues.
4. Reducing staff turnover
High staff turnover is detrimental to your company’s operational continuity. When staff leave, you lose valuable expertise and experience, and spend a lot of time recruiting and training replacements.
Sound personnel management helps you give your staff the tools and resources they need to perform to the best of their abilities and to continue to grow both personally and professionally. Not only are happy, satisfied employees more productive, but they’re also more loyal because they feel more appreciated.
The benefits
You’ll discover many benefits to having a good personnel management system in place:
1. Staff have the freedom and flexibility to excel
By focusing on continued professional development, your staff have the freedom and flexibility they need to excel. A rigid, inflexible organization will then become more value-oriented, specifically in terms of the added value its staff provide.
2. It encourages continued professional development
Personnel management entails setting goals and defining frameworks in which staff are fully involved in achieving. It challenges staff to use their creativity and professionalism to the full, to experience satisfaction in their work, and to share in the success. Once one goal or objective has been achieved, the next is ready and waiting as a stimulus for continued professional development and growth. Personnel management also encourages lifelong learning and on-the-job training.
3. It safeguards long-term continuity
Staff leave your organization for many reasons: labor market shortages, retirement, competition. Sound personnel management practices make it much easier for you to respond in a timely fashion to staff leaving, either expectedly or unexpectedly. This helps you prevent a ‘brain drain’ and safeguard long-term operational continuity.
Mapping & visualizing skills
Personnel management requires having a clear picture of all your staff’s skills, knowledge, and qualifications. Skills matrices are the ideal way to consolidate this information. They provide a schematic view showing who can do what and whether any skills gaps are emerging within your organization.
Using skills matrices has numerous benefits.
- You can identify critical tasks and requirements quickly and easily, and align your personnel management strategy accordingly.
- It becomes much easier to find skilled/qualified replacements or extra staff during peak periods.
- You’ll have a far clearer picture of how your staff are progressing.
- You’ll gain better insights into your staff’s deployability.
Personnel management and skills matrices go hand in hand. Download one of our Excel skills matrix templates to get started, or take a more professional approach with special-purpose skills management software.
Request a free live demo to find out more about our software.
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