In a nutshell, Strategic Human Resources Management (known to lesser mortals as manpower planning) is all about getting the right people, with the right skills, in the right place, at the right time, and then providing the right structure and balance of motivation and reward to keep them there. This is hard enough to achieve in a large organization that has the resources to employ Human Resource Professionals (personnel managers), that can afford the necessary reward structures and opportunities for promotion or career development, and that can make use of highly specialized skills. However, as we have discussed a number of times in previous chapters, the average small firm does not have these luxuries, often lacking or possessing only limited resources, relying on the limited personnel knowledge of the boss and the willingness of the multi-skilled staff to be flexible in their work.

The revised vocational standards contain a number of Units relating to staff management; however, the majority of these are concerned with what are essentially operational issues. Unit J2 is about counselling, staff discipline and dismissal, Unit J3 relates to redeployment and redundancy (hardly an ideal objective for the owner-manager anticipating expansion), and Unit J4 is about recruitment and selection. Units K1, K3 and K4 are concerned with mentoring staff, and training and developing them to improve skills. This chapter will concentrate on Unit J1, that relates to the more strategic issues of auditing the existing staff resources, the numbers of staff and range of available skills etc.,...