Strategic Human Resource Management

Strategic Human Resource Management

 A.  What Is Strategic Human Resource Management?

1. Strategic HRM means formulating and executing human resource policies and practices that produce the employee competencies and behaviors that companies need to achieve their strategic aims.

       B.  Improving Performance: The Strategic Context

       C.  Improving Performance: HR As a Profit Center

       D.  Sustainability and Strategic Human Resource Management – today’s emphasis on sustainability has important consequences for human resource management.  HR policies and practices can support a firm’s sustainability strategy and goals.

       E. Strategic Human Management Tools

1.  Strategy Map – summarizes how each department's performance contributes to achieving the company’s overall strategic goal.

2.  HR scorecard – a process for assigning financial and nonfinancial goals or metrics to human resource management-related strategy map chain of activities required for achieving the company’s strategic aims.

3.  Digital Dashboards – presents the manager with the desktop graphics and charts, showing a computerized picture of how the company is doing on all metrics from the HR scorecard process.

HR Metrics, Benchmarking, and Data Analytics

A.    Improving Performance: Through HRIS: Tracking Applicant Metrics for Improved Talent Management

B.     Benchmarking – occurs when an organization compares the practices of high performing companies’ results to your own, to understand what makes them better. 

C.     Strategy and Strategy-Based Metrics – benchmarking is only part of the process. To reveal the extent to which your firm’s HR practices are supporting its strategic goals, strategy-based metrics are used to measure the activities that contribute to achieving the company’s strategic aims.

D.   What Are HR Audits? – these audits are a way for an organization to measure where it currently stands and determines what it has to accomplish to improve its HR functions.

E.   Evidence-Based HR and the Scientific Way of Doing Things – evidence-based HR is the use of data, facts, etc. to support HR proposals, decisions, practices, and conclusions. This requires managers to be more scientific in making organizational decisions. This approach requires objectivity, experimentation, quantification, explanation, prediction, and replication.

F.  Trends Shaping HR: Digital and Social Media

1. Talent Analytics – tools that enable employers to analyze, in new ways, employee data both on obvious things (like employee demographics, training, and performance ratings), but also data from new sources (like company internal social media sites, GPS tracking, and email activity).

G. Trends Shaping HR: Science In Talent Management  

V.        High-Performance Work Systems –a set of human resource management policies

            and practices that together produce superior employee performance.

VI.       Employee Engagement Guide for Managers: Employee Engagement and Performance

A.      The Employee Engagement Problem – Gallup distinguishes among engaged employees “who work with passion and feel a profound connection to their company,” and not engaged employees who are essentially “checked out,” and actively disengaged employees.

B.       What Can Managers Do to Improve Employee Engagement? – managers improve employee engagement by taking concrete steps to do so, such as: providing supportive supervision, making sure employees understand how their departments contribute to the company’s success, see how their efforts contribute to achieving the company’s goals, get a sense of accomplishment from working at the firm, and are highly involved – as when working in self-managing teams.

C.       How to Measure Employee Engagement – firms like Gallup (www.gallup.com) and Tower Watson (www.towerswatson.com/en-US) offer comprehensive employee engagement survey services.