U16A1 P1 P2 M1
Unit 16 Assignment 1
Planning the human resource requirements of an organisation
These factors create organisational change in order to allow Tesco to compete, and HR have to
respond to this change. Change needs to happen to allow future business growth, and HR need
to make sure they have the right staff with the right skills to cope with this change.
P1
Internal factors
Workforce needs
Tesco needs to consider workforce needs, which are things that your employees need.
Keeping workforce needs met will help to keep employee morale up which in turn can lead to a
lower staff turnover and more productivity. To meet workforce needs, HR have to consider
things such as do the staff need training, do they have opportunities to learn and progress, the
need for appraisals to motivate them.
Training
HR need to consider whether their employees need to be trained, this is usually when a
change occurs in the business, for example when Tesco started offering home deliveries they
needed to train people on how to stock up the van, how to use their systems to know when and
where to deliver to, etc. HR also need to consider training costs into their budget, as well as
whether they will need to recruit any new people if the needed knowledge is something that
requires experience.
Reliance on overtime
If Tesco have a reliance on overtime then HR have the consider this because it shows that
Tesco needs more staff, especially since overtime can cost more and staff may not want to / be
able to do overtime and this could leave the business having to close early or not get work done
in time. HR will probably need to recruit more people or manage the staff better so they are
more efficient and able to get work done without the need for overtime. If there isn’t enough
staff, or if staff are unhappy due to doing overtime, Tesco may not be able to meet customer
expectations which is important especially considering their core purpose is ‘Serving shoppers a
little better every day’.
Skills shortage
Skills shortage is where you don’t have staff with the right qualifications / experience to fulfil a
position, in which case training will need to be done or new people will need to be recruited
because you don’t want people in the wrong jobs as this could lead to unhappy staff or work not
being done correctly. This can also be an external issue because there may not be enough
people with these skills in the workforce and therefore you aren’t able to recruit them. Tesco
have a job role called Technical Programme Manager, where it is a requirement to have
, experience using particular tools and programmes, if they didn’t have someone with this
experience they would want to recruit someone who does have it rather than have someone
without the requirement filling the role.
Budget implications
HR have to consider what money they have to spend on things such as staff, maintenance,
resources, (etc.) they need to be able to justify spending and make sure they keep to the
budget. This will influence what money is spent within the business, for example, is it cheaper to
train current staff or recruit new staff? Tesco may need to be able to buy a new programme to
help with their online shopping service, in which case they will need to budget this in to make
sure they can afford it.
Exit interviews
Exit interviews are important because the company needs to know why the staff are leaving, is
it because there is a problem that can be dealt with? If lots of people are leaving their jobs at
tesco, it may be because they are unhappy with something such as their manager, in which
case that store would be able to deal with this. If it something else, such as unhappy because
they don’t have the training needed for their job and so are struggling, HR will need to consider
this so they can budget in training to prevent high staff turnover.
Staff turnover
Staff turnover is the ratio of how many staff are leaving compared to how many new members
of staff are being employed, having a high staff turnover would suggest that something is going
wrong at Tesco, for example the staff are unhappy or leaving to work for a competitor. HR would
need to conduct exit interviews in order to look into this, because if it is high due to people
leaving to go to university or change career path they can’t do anything about this however if it
is because of unhappy staff they will want to solve this, especially as recruiting new staff costs
money.
External factors
Competitor strategies
Competitor strategies is looking at what your rivals are doing. HR would need to consider this
when planning its HR requirements, for example if Morrisons’ staff were doing something extra
that Tesco wasn’t doing, Tesco would want to look at this and considering doing it as well in
order to keep up with competition. This may require training current staff or recruiting some new
staff in order to do this, something which HR will have to consider.
Economic climate
The economic climate is the overall condition of the economy, Tesco have to consider what is
happening in the UK that could cause customers to or not to buy from their stores. HR need to
know what is going on in the economic climate to be able to plan how to maintain profits during
an economic downturn, because people are not going to want to spend as much money when
