Planning

Nurses Wanted

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Roobcio/Shutterstock

As we have learned from our Recruitment and Selection studies, the Canadian demographic makeup is undergoing a significant transformation. We are facing significant increases in the number of people retiring or exiting the workforce as they continue to age. This aging and exiting workforce is leaving behind high numbers of job vacancies, along with a corresponding decrease in the number of skilled and available workers for those jobs. This pattern is evident and highlighted recently in the province of New Brunswick. Provincially, the health care sector will not be able to meet increasing patient needs due to the predicted lack of availability in skilled and talented nurses.

In order to address this issue, the New Brunswick government has put together a provincial ‘Nursing Resource Strategy’. This is a pro-active recruitment plan designed to meet current and future nursing demands. The strategy has four action items which include the targeted recruitment of internationally trained nurses; reducing barriers to work while waiting for provincial nursing registration; permanent employment offers and potential signing bonuses for new nurses committing to work for three years in the province’s rural areas.

Click here to read about New Brunswick’s nursing recruitment strategies.

As the focus of this strategy is to increase the numbers of internationally trained nurses, the plan includes targeted recruitment from countries with nursing education programs that provide ‘similar nursing professional standards, competencies, and credentials’. This approach links directly to the need for accurate job analysis so that there is a precise match between the alignment of job availability, professional requirements, and candidate competencies.

Further, this plan is based on an analysis of demographic information that forecasts both the supply and demand of skilled nurses over a nine-year plan. It may seem that a nine-year time frame is focused far into the future but, the current state of this skilled labour shortage is already at a critical stage and cannot wait for any future delays.

New Brunswick’s ‘Nursing Resource Strategy’ is a plan that has been developed for one particular province to meet its health care sector needs. The plan includes demographic analysis, staffing forecasts, job analysis, professional and competency requirements, action items and a time frame for delivery. In summary, the approach provides us with a template for what an effective recruitment strategy looks like. All that remains is effective implementation.

Discussion Questions:

  1. Identify additional recruitment strategies that could increase the availability of skilled and qualified nurses in New Brunswick.
  2. What types of services or industries are impacted by the lack of skilled nurses provincially?
  3. What types of skill shortages are forecast for your province?
  4. What types of recruitment strategies would you put into place to address these skill shortages?
  5. As a new graduate, would you be willing to relocate to another province or another country if you were given a guarantee of employment in your field? Explain your rationale.

Party Planning

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There are three tasks that strike fear into the heart of every Human Resources practitioner.

  1. Responsibility for designating employee parking spots.
  2. Responsibility for employee seniority lists.
  3. Responsibility for planning the company office party.

Each of these is fraught with difficulties for various reasons. The only common thread for all three tasks is that, in the end, no matter how hard they try to get it ‘right’, someone will be angry with the designated HR practitioner.

The first two tasks require the categorization of individuals based on organizational hierarchy, length of service and other definition based processes. Nobody likes the processes or the end results, except for those who benefit from them with the good parking spot or the top notch on the seniority list.

The third task, the office party, comes with a host of challenges, which include trying to provide organized glee for people who may, or may not, want to socialize with each other after working hours. What is meant to be a positive event for employees, to thank them for their efforts, comes with rules, regulations, and stipulations as a result of unfortunate party outcomes from the past.

The office party is linked to Occupational Health and Safety for many reasons.  There are numerous risks that come with the gathering of individuals who are meant to get together to have a ‘good time’.  Celebratory food, drinks, games and dancing are all part of what most people expect when they have a party.  When one of these elements goes wrong (the food results in salmonella poisoning; the games and/or dancing cause physical injuries; the drinks lubricate individuals to the point of lewd behaviour), the employer is liable for the consequences. Rather than the event ending in a feel good result for everyone, when things go wrong, the employer is left with significant costs and potential penalties under the provisions of the Occupational Health and Safety Act.

Does this mean that employees can no longer have any fun?  No, not exactly.

Good party planning, which includes reasonable precautions, should result in successful party celebrations, as noted in HRMOnline.

Click here to read the article.

For a good time to be had by all, a good plan needs to be in place first.  Once the party is over, the only thing that people should remember is that they did have some fun, with no disastrous results for anyone.

If everybody ends up being happy, hopefully, the HR Practitioner can be happy too.

Discussion Questions:

  1. Interview a Health and Safety representative at your current workplace to ask them about the potential risks involved in an employee office party both on-site and off-site.
  2. What types of safety risks do you think are involved for an employee ‘gathering’ at a bar outside of working hours?
  3. If you had responsibility for planning an office social event, how would you proceed? Would you include alcohol, games, dancing?  Why or why not?
  4. Have you participated in an office social event? What was it like?  What would you change about the event?

 

Promises Made, Promises Broken

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Simply put, the collective agreement is an employment contract.  As you will remember from your employment law studies, any employment contract that is formed between two parties, must have an offer, acceptance, and consideration in order for that contract to be enforceable.   In a unionized environment, each time the collective agreement is renewed through the legitimate process of collective bargaining, these principles of offer, acceptance, and consideration remain in play.  Once the parties have agreed to the terms of renewal, they have a contract between them.  Signed, sealed, and delivered.

Source: ALEXSTAND/Shutterstock
Source: ALEXSTAND/Shutterstock

The collective agreement is not a one sided ‘union’ contract that the employer can ignore.  It is a contract between two parties.  Nothing will harden and sour the relationship between an employer and a union more than the perception that the employer is ignoring the terms of a negotiated, settled, and accepted collective agreement.

Let’s look at this from a personal perspective.  If I agree to sell my house to a buyer, we negotiate the sale of the house and everything that is agreed and committed through a signed contract.  If that contract includes the agreement on my part to leave all of the window dressings in place, then I leave them in place!   I don’t take them with me or destroy them – That is not what I agreed to do.  If I do take them with me, I should expect a very unfavourable reaction from the other party because I have deliberately broken the contract between us. Actions are similar with collective agreement administration.  If the employer agrees to something during the life of the agreed upon contract, and then breaks that agreement, the union is going to react in a negative way.  This result should not be a surprise to anybody with the responsibility for administering a collective agreement.

Yet, it happens, as is discussed in the article, below.

Click here to read the article. 

It is easy to be an armchair critic and wonder why the employer, in this case, would have agreed to a commitment of no layoffs during the life of a collective agreement if they knew they could not afford it. We must remember that any contract negotiation is never straightforward and we have to live with the results.

What are the Human Resources lessons to take from all of this?  Effective HR planning and preparation for realistic implementation of a collective agreement is critical!  And, do not make promises you can not keep.

Discussion Questions:

  1. What types of terms could have been negotiated into this collective agreement?
  2. What could the employer have done differently in order to lessen the impact on unionized employees?
  3. Identify three specific pieces of information that an HR practitioner could have included as part of collective bargaining preparation?
  4. What steps would you advise the union to follow in this case?

 

Boom or Bust?

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It may seem that the concepts of HR Supply and HR Demand come from an almost clinical approach.  This is most evident when we look at these concepts through a human capital lens and try to apply formulas to predict the ebb and flow of human resources supply and demand.

Words Boom and Bust on opposite ends of a balance
Source: Mark Carrel/Shutterstock

Predicting the patterns of potential employee movements are not isolated exercises – They are all connected and part of bigger picture circumstances.

For example, the overall economic situation in Alberta provides us with an excellent opportunity to consider how individual employees will be impacted by the changing economy.

Click Here to Read the Article

As we read in this article, Alberta was once the province offering an abundance of HR demand. There were lots of jobs and lots of opportunity.  Now, Alberta is the province facing the very real impact of too much HR supply – Increasingly fewer jobs and much less opportunity.  HR’s role will be critical in determining how this oversupply will be managed and, most importantly, how the individual employee will be impacted as a result.

We cannot forget that any HR supply and demand analysis is about people.  Analysis and formulaic approaches help us with planning predictions; however, we must remember that the implementation of these plans will have an impact on our fellow humans as we all move into a challenging and unpredictable future.

Discussion Questions:

  1. What types of compensation strategies would lessen the need for layoffs in Alberta?
  2. If you had to accept a wage reduction in order to have your work colleagues keep their jobs, what would you do?
  3. Identify three critical steps that the HR professional should be taking when considering staffing reductions due to economic indicators.
  4. What would be the biggest challenge for you when preparing an HR plan that includes staffing reductions?