Abstract
Purpose: The main purpose of the paper is to evaluate the impact of diverse personnel policies around personnel promotion in the design of the strategic staff plan for a public university. The strategic staff planning consists in the determination of the size and composition of the workforce for an organization.Design/methodology/approach: The staff planning is solved using a Mixed Integer Linear Programming (MILP) model. The MILP model represents the organizational structure of the university, the personnel categories and capacity decisions, the demand requirements, the required service level and budget restrictions. All these aspects are translated into a set of data, as well as the parameters and constraints building up the mathematical model for optimization. The required data for the model is adopted from a Spanish public university.Findings: The development of appropriate policies for personnel promotion can effectively reduce the number of dismissals while proposing a transition towards different preferable workforce structures in the university.Research limitations/implications: The long term staff plan for the university is solved by the MILP model considering a time horizon of 8 years. For this time horizon, the required input data is derived from current data of the university. Different scenarios are proposed considering different temporal trends for input data, such as in demand and admissible promotional ratios for workers.Originality/value: The literature review reports a lack of formalized procedures for staff planning in universities taking into account, at the same time, the regulations on hiring, dismissals, promotions and the workforce heterogeneity, all considered to optimize workforce size and composition addressing not only an economic criteria, but also the required workforce expertise and the quality in the service offered. This paper adopts a formalized procedure developed by the authors in previous works, and exploits it to assess the impact of various personnel policies in the staff planning for a particular university case, and this is the principal contribution of the paper.
Highlights
During the last decades, in many European countries, the Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) have been facing new pressures in an increasingly business oriented environment: the reformulation and unification of academic degrees in Europe; the creation of the European Research Area (ERA); the identification of new public funding; the increasing emphasis on university-industry relationship; and the stress in patenting and entrepreneurship (Mckelvey & Holmen, 2009)
For HEIs, adopting tools for assessing the strategic staff planning it is convenient taking into account diverse factors such as: the rigid regulations in the university policies, the low availability in the labour market of suitable candidates and the very long learning periods required for workers, among others
The main applications of this planning tool are: to update the plan for workforce and the assessment of the impact that different strategies may have on the personnel costs and the structure of a university; i.e. the accomplishment of a preferable staff composition, adding/eliminating new courses or studies; increasing/reducing the number of students per group; changes in teaching capacity requirements; investment in training and research; changes in the proportion of people that can be promoted; allowing or not dismissals in non-tenure track staff; or prioritizing promotions over external hiring
Summary
In many European countries, the Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) have been facing new pressures in an increasingly business oriented environment: the reformulation and unification of academic degrees in Europe; the creation of the European Research Area (ERA); the identification of new public funding; the increasing emphasis on university-industry relationship; and the stress in patenting and entrepreneurship (Mckelvey & Holmen, 2009). As pointed out by Machuca, González-Zamora and Aguilar-Escobar (2007), there has been a gap between the growing importance in the strategic planning for the organization of HEIs, and public services in general, and the number of studies in literature These practices, when supported by formalized procedures, are so far adopted by manufacturing industry, noticing very few examples in the service sector (i.e. call centres, supermarkets and so on). The development of a formalized procedure for the strategic staff planning in public universities was previously addressed by the authors in de la Torre, Lusa and Mateo (2014, 2016) These works report the lack of formalized procedures for staff planning in universities taking into account, at the same time, the regulations on hiring, dismissals, promotions and the workforce heterogeneity, all considered to optimize workforce size and composition addressing an economic criteria, and the required workforce expertise and the service level offered.
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