BSBHRM513 - Workforce Planning: Industrial Relations and Strategies

This report provides a comprehensive overview of workforce planning, addressing key areas such as gathering information on labor supply, understanding industrial relations and their role in maintaining a skilled workforce, describing labor demand forecasting and labor supply analysis, and identifying methods to estimate future staffing requirements. It delves into workforce planning aspects like current workforce analysis, future needs identification, gap analysis, and solution implementation, referencing Air services Australia's strategic workforce plan and Peter Howes' insights on HR capabilities. The report also explores the impact of competition, compensation, legislation, and employee relations on workforce planning. Furthermore, it highlights strategies for retaining and attracting skilled labor, the importance of contingency planning, and the potential for industrial relations conflicts, with citations from ABC News, HRM online, and relevant academic sources. Desklib offers this document along with a wealth of study tools and solved assignments for students.

Running head: MANAGING WORKFORCE
Managing workforce
Name of the student:
Name of the university:
Author note

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Question 1
Organizations can gather current information about labor supply relevant to the specific
industry or skill requirements in the following ways-
 Information can be gathered from the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS)
 Groups of industry can be consulted to collect data
 It is required to study and evaluate the data and reports of state government workplace
profile (Bratton and Gold 2017)
 Attending specialist conferences and going through the research reports also help in
gathering data about labor supply
 Going through the industry journals and consulting with the government agencies also
help in collecting information
 It is also effective to read government audit reports and green papers
 Analyzing the retirement patterns help in gathering relevant data
 It is important to access the Skilled Occupational List
 Consulting with the trade unions and the respective employee representative groups are
also helpful (Crettenden et al. 2014)
 It is effective to go through the Australian Journal of Public Administration
Question 2
Industrial relations include the processes by which workplace relationships are expressed.
It also deals with conflict resolution between the managers and the workers or trade unions. The
two terms ‘industry’ and ‘relations’ convey different meanings (De Bruecker et al. 2015).
Industry is associated with a productive activity of the individuals and relations refer to the

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bonding between the employer and the employees. Therefore, the term industrial relations
signify the relationship shared by the employers and the employees and the trade unions in the
workplace.
The industrial relations help in maintaining the talented and skilled workforce as it is
directly related to the working conditions. For instance, if an employee is satisfied with the
salary, team bonding, benefits, rewards, recognitions and the opportunity in their career, they
will not go for searching other jobs as they are getting everything in their own job.
Question 3
Labor demand forecasting refers to the finding of right people with the appropriate skills
in the perfect time. The HR department in the organization can make use of qualitative and
quantitative data for forecasting labor demand. The steps of workforce trend analysis or
econometric calculation is used as an approach.
Labor supply analysis identifies and evaluates the skills of the labor. This analysis also
looks into the matter of internal allocation from the company or external hiring of labors. The
primary step in this analysis is to find out the relevant skills as per the industry standards and
then look out for employees with the specific skills. Skills availability will be a major area of
consideration while looking out for external labors in the job market.
Question 4
There are different methods to estimate future staffing requirements such as HR budget
and planning analysis, workforce analysis and job analysis.

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In HR budget and planning analysis, the planners can make use of new- venture analysis
when there is complication in employment planning due to new businesses. Workforce analysis
refers to the rate of entry and out flow of the employees. This analysis is helpful in estimating the
labor or employee turnover rate, rate of absenteeism and others. Job analysis is another effective
way to find out the skills and abilities required for efficient completion of the job. Jobs are
studied on detail for analysis to find out the criteria required in terms of qualification and
experience.
Project 1
According to Minnesota Management and Budget, the aspects of workforce planning
includes current workforce analysis, identifying the need for future workforce, finding out the
gap between the present and the future, incorporate the solutions to achieve the organizational
goals and objective. For instance, Air services Australia focuses on their strategic workforce plan
to connect between their strategic objectives and the required initiatives of the people to achieve
those objectives (Airservicesaustralia.com 2018). As per Peter Howes LFAHRI, vice president of
workforce planning and analytics, at the SAP Company, Success Factors, the HR capabilities if
conducted properly will benefit the workforce planning and analytics. By keeping a gap of two
years or more in the forecasting period, the labor resource planning can be distinguished for the
upcoming year (HRM online 2018).
The importance of these aspects in workforce planning helps in forecasting the number of
laborers and the specific type of skills required for attaining organizational success. A
comparison is drawn between the available workforce and the future needs to fulfill the gaps.
Strategic workforce planning is referred to as the major concept in risk reduction (Hojby and

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Zhang 2016). The risk of the organization lies in being unable to fulfill the job criteria in the
future and the probable effect on the organization. Moreover, workforce planning also aids in
planning for the improvement of the internal employees for efficient planning and management
of career.
The external and internal that factors affect workforce planning are given below-
Competition- the amount of competition in the market affects the company’s ability to
recruit talented workforce
Compensation- the labor supply encourages the compensation required to offer for
attracting new employees.
Legislation- it is such a factor of workforce planning that affects all kinds of HR
activities.
Employee relations- the internal policies of the company also affect the HR activities. For
instance, if the company believes in internal promotion, then the HR should pan for effective
training and development of the employees (McKenzie 2011).
It is important to retain and attract skilled labors by using the strategies of increase in
pay, collaborative culture, effective training and development and innovating technology. The
company will get the benefit of saving on the operating cost by investing on the older employees
rather than on the newer ones. Boston Consulting Group in Australia has warned of the labor
shortage in Australia which will take a serious role in the next decade (ABC News, 2018).
The purpose of contingency planning is to allow an organization to continue with its
routine activities quickly after an unforeseen event. It is effective in protecting the resources to

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reduce customer inconvenience. For instance, Nokia had used contingency planning by making
the right choice on Windows Phone. Contingency planning must begin at a point where it might
affect the industrial relations as it could lead to a conflict or strike among the trade unions
(Steingold 2017).

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References
ABC News. (2018). Labour shortage predicted to hamper economy. [online] Available at:
http://www.abc.net.au/news/2014-08-04/labour-shortage-predicted-to-hamper-australian-
economy/5647196 [Accessed 26 Mar. 2018].
Airservicesaustralia.com. (2018). Workforce plan. [online] Available at:
http://www.airservicesaustralia.com/wp-content/uploads/12-084BKT_Workforce_plan_2012-
17_WEB1.pdf [Accessed 26 Mar. 2018].
Bratton, J. and Gold, J., 2017. Human resource management: theory and practice. Palgrave.
Crettenden, I.F., McCarty, M.V., Fenech, B.J., Heywood, T., Taitz, M.C. and Tudman, S., 2014.
How evidence-based workforce planning in Australia is informing policy development in the
retention and distribution of the health workforce. Human resources for health, 12(1), p.7.
De Bruecker, P., Van den Bergh, J., Beliën, J. and Demeulemeester, E., 2015. Workforce
planning incorporating skills: State of the art. European Journal of Operational
Research, 243(1), pp.1-16.
Hojby, S. and Zhang, K.Y., SuccessFactors Inc, 2016. Transferring Employees in Operational
Workforce Planning. U.S. Patent Application 14/506,424.
HRM online. (2018). Workforce planning and analytics - HRM online. [online] Available at:
http://www.hrmonline.com.au/section/strategic-hr/workforce-planning-analytics/ [Accessed 26
Mar. 2018].
McKenzie, F.H., 2011. Attracting and retaining skilled and professional staff in remote locations
of Australia. The Rangeland Journal, 33(4), pp.353-363.

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Steingold, F.S., 2017. The employer's legal handbook: Manage your employees & workplace
effectively. Nolo.