2.5: Putting It Together- Human Resource Strategy and Planning

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Nina Burokas
Lumen Learning

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The essence of management and strategy is making sense of reality: human, organizational, and situational. And, more critically, to be able to act on that insight. From both an executive management and human relations management standpoint, strategy is about alignment: alignment of the mission, core values, culture, competitive strategy and supporting infrastructure, including policies and practices.

As Jim Collins and Jerry Porras phrase it in Built to Last: Successful Habits of Visionary Companies: “Building a visionary company requires one percent vision and 99 percent alignment.” Alignment also requires an understanding of human motivation and how to inspire a belief in and commitment to that vision. To quote Simon Sinek: “If you hire people just because they can do a job, they’ll work for your money. But if you hire people who believe what you believe, they’ll work for you with blood and sweat and tears.”

The following table summarizes both the strategic planning process and the implications for human resource strategy:^[1]

Strategic Analysis, Strategy Formulation, and Strategy Implementation
	Strategic Analysis	Strategy Formulation	Strategy Implementation
Business Strategy	Assess driving forces in the industry	Formulate mission, vision, and values	Develop organizational capabilities
	Determine key success factors	Define culture, management philosophy, and business practices	Manage performance
	Assess business and organizational capabilities	Set business objectives and priorities
	Define strategic issues	Develop action plans
	Identify competitive advantage and associated market positioning	Allocate resources
Human Resources Strategy	Assess people and organizational implications [of business strategy]	Develop people-related strategies in support of business strategy	Enable effective change
	Assess people-related organizational capabilities		Align core people management processes to enable implementation
	Determine future people and organizational requirements		Align human resources function with changing requirements
	Identify people-related capability gaps		Establish and implement a business plan for the HR function

Bawany, Sattar. "The Role and Future of HR: Today's Challenges & Tomorrow's Vision." HR.com. January 6, 2015. Accessed July 30, 2019.