The use of a Job analysis aims to gather a comprehensive profile of all the posts in the Marks and Spender organisation illustrated by the skills and duties of these jobs. Performed through the tools of a job description and person specification leading to skills check making available supporting information in the form of a survey of all existing staff confirming the current competencies of the workforce in terms of skills, qualifications and experience.
In a national retailer such as Marks and Spencer it is extremely important the human resources planning function plans and identifies the human resources requirements, for example if Marks and Spender install a new integrated computer network how many new staff would be required to operate such technology. The result being that Marks and Spencer would have to efficiently recruit sufficient staff to successfully function properly. On the other hand less staff may be hired resulting in too few employees overstretching thus causing ill feeling, de-motivation and possibly costly legal disputes.
Internal and external plan for human resources,
Marks and Spencer will require a great deal of data and other information from internal workforce and externally from the availability of the skilled labour.
Over a period of time Marks and Spencer will gather a comprehensive profile on its employees past and present. This will also include the following:
- The number of employees departing the organisation within the next year into account age, qualifications and skills either through resignation or retirement or even dismissal
- The number of staff joining the organisation within the next year
- The reason for staff leaving the organisation in addition to the time spent with Marks and Spencer.
- The average time taken off by the workforce due to sickness, maternity, bereavement or other factors.
The factors above are used to determine the rate of labour turnover; this is a measurement of the rate existing employees leave Marks and Spencer. If the rate of labour turnover increases employees are on average spending less time in employment within Marks and Spencer.
An unnecessary level of labour turnover may incur Marks and Spencer Human Resources Planning function additional expenditure. This could include the recruitment and selection which substantial financial and manpower resources will be allocated to assist it improvements. Although this
is beneficial to employees because the vacant posts covered by exiting employees working overtime means extra payments in terms of wages, this means less money for the organisation. Training and development expenditure will rise dramatically as new inexperienced employees enter the organisation. The new inexperienced employees may produce less output and poorer quality work thus higher costs will be spent on this problem.
Incentive payments will be offered to link to length of stay with Marks and Spencer ion an attempt to increase staff loyalty.
A drain of Marks and Spencer financial resources must come from workplace incidents and ill health situations. This also impacts on output thus revenue of the organisation. These problems may be linked directly to poor working conditions in the workplace. Inadequate training may be influential in causing injury in addition to constant pressure on staff possibly leading to high levels of stress, which could affect on absenteeism.
