Strategic Human Resource Management

Section Three

responsibility for assisting in the development of pools of talent
for the new jobs of the future. Further, the human resource
function will need to help redesign organizations to meet the
demands of the future, such as being able to respond to
customer preferences more quickly, provide higher quality,
make faster decisions, and be more cost competitive.^27 The
interplay of the current trend toward organizational
restructuring and redesign will have to be integrated with
strategic human resource planning efforts.

Implications of the European Experience

It is interesting to speculate whether the growing restrictions in
the United States on employers’ abilities to lay off employees
also will serve as an additional incentive for human resource
planning. In the future, if layoffs in the United States become
more restricted by legislation, as in Europe, U.S. companies
may place greater emphasis on human resource planning as a
means of avoiding employee surpluses. This may be an
interesting hypothesis to consider, as some European
companies had developed sophisticated human resource
planning programs prior to the 1980s. Expertise in human
resource planning also is evident in the recent planning success
of one of the companies now making up Astrazeneca
Pharmaceuticals.^28 C. J. Verhoeven, a Dutch researcher, has