Meauring HR's contibution:

PUBLISHED FOR EDUCATIONAL REASONS FOR KISHOR

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STRATEGY, METRICS AND THE HR SCORECARD

Info: This will provie a good example that ilustrates HR's role in formulating and esecuting company strategy.

Strategy: The company's long-term plan for how it will balance its internal strengths and weaknesses with its external opportunities and threats to maintain a competitive advantage.

HR's priorities and tasks evolve over time, because they need to fit or make sense in terms of the company's strategic direction. As well see through out this article, HR's central task is always to provide a set of servi es that make sense in terms of the company's strategy.

A strategy is a the company's plan for how it will balance its internal strengths and weaknesses with external opportunities and threats in order to maintain a competitive advantage. Ferrari therefore has different HR policies and practices than does Ford, and Wal-Mart has different HR policies than does Neiman Marcus.

Trends like globalization and increased competition have placed HR front center in most firm's strategic planning efforts. For example, we will see that HR managers today are more involved in partnering with their top managers in both designing and implementing their companies strategics. Today's emphasis in gainng competitive advantage through people makes input from the department that helps to screen, train, appraise, and reward employees too important to ignore when the company is reviewing its strategic options. Today's focus on competitiveness and operational improvements also means that all managers - including HR - must be much more adept at expressing their departmental plans and accomplishments in mesurable terms.

Top management wants to see, precisely, how the HR manager's plans will make the company more valuable, for instance by boosting morale and, thereby, improving performance.

An Emphasis on Performance

A recent survey of HR professionals shows that the pressure for more performance hasn't been lost on HR mangers. [When asked to rate the importance of various business issues, their five top choices were competition for market share, price competition/ price control, governmental regulations, need for sales growth, and need to increase productivity].

HR managers also know that establishing competitive, high-performance work systems under condition of rapid change isn't easy. This helps to explain why another survey of HR executives found that their main concern is "Managing change". So, today's successful HR manager must have the capacity to visualize how he or she can adopt HR systems to support the companies strategic needs and the ability to execute the required changes. These changes may range from new incentive plans that encourage employee innovation, to centralized HR call centers to boost the HR unit's efficiency, to moving more HR activities onto the web, and to organizing telecommuter programs.

For HR, this focus on performance also requires more measurability. Management expects HR to provide measurable benchmark based evidence for its current efficiency and effectiveness, and for the expected efficiency and effictiveness of new or proposed HR programs. In other words, management expects solid, qualified evidence that HR is contributing in a meaningful and positive way to achieving the firm's strategic aims.