The demands that companies place on their personnel planners are extremely high today. On the one hand, personnel planning should be as efficient as possible and leave little room for idle time. On the other hand, personnel planners must be able to react to changes at short notice and adapt personnel planning flexibly. This is a balancing act that is not easy to master, even though various tools such as personnel planning apps are now available for this purpose.
Good personnel planning today means that all employees are fully utilised and Jobs and work assignments can be completed on time and smoothly. Because those who plan well perform better and also make more profit on the bottom line.
But what do personnel planners do if an employee falls ill or material for the Job is not delivered? What does it mean for personnel planning when Jobs are added at short notice or a installer has to return to the customer? Then it means for personnel planners to react quickly to these changes. It's true that digitization has spawned new staff planner apps that simplify the planning process. But the expectations of customers have also changed, so that personnel planning itself now seems much more complex.
On the one hand, HR planning is complex because information reaches the HR planner via a wide variety of channels. Whereas communication used to be limited to mail, fax and landline telephone, the exchange of information with customers and colleagues mainly takes place via e-mail, messenger or cell phone. Instead of fixed office hours, everyone can be reached virtually any time of day, any place. This often means that HR planners are expected to respond immediately. This leaves them little time to collect the new information from the various channels and then reconcile it with the existing workforce planning.
For this to work, HR planners first need the necessary overview. This is provided by personnel planner apps that have been specifically developed for personnel planning. However, standard programs such as Excel and Google Sheets are also suitable instead of a personnel planning app. Google Sheets has the advantage that the personnel planning table can be accessed from anywhere.
This means that up-to-date information is directly available to all employees at all times. However, the disadvantage of both Excel and Google Sheets is that even with a successful template, the HR planner has to enter a lot of information manually and adjust it again when changes are made. In contrast, HR planner apps are not free, but they offer many more features: automated updates to all employees, digital documentation of Jobs, and all information bundled in one place.
The answer is yes and no. As mentioned above, workforce planning should be efficient and flexible. However, when it comes to what information HR planners should provide to employees, there are big differences. Personnel planning in the trades, for example, has different requirements than personnel planning in the catering industry. The waiter wants to know from when to when his shift runs and for which tables he is responsible. The mechanic, however, needs completely different information. Has the customer's address changed? Is the Job history information needed? As is so often the case, the devil is in the details here. While staff planning in table form may be sufficient in the case of the waiter, the craftsman probably needs a greater range of functions such as those offered by a staff planner app.
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