By Dada Adefolami
The definition of business strategy is a long-term plan of action designed to achieve a particular goal or set of goals or objectives. Strategy is management’s game plan for strengthening the performance of the enterprise. It states how business should be conducted to achieve the desired goals.
Strategy meetings often involve revisiting mission and value statements, which set forth basic business goals. General strategies set forth general plans for business growth, while competitive strategies identify specific means of reaching those targets.
A business strategy typically is a document that clearly articulates the direction a business will pursue and the steps it will take to achieve its goals. In a standard business plan, the business strategy results from goals established to support the stated mission of the business
An organization’s resources. will probably contribute to most of the weaknesses and strengths in a SWOT analysis. but not all, resources can be remembered by using the ‘M’ words: money, manufacturing, material, marketing, machinery, methods, management information, management, and men and women. Management, men and women can be called the organization’s human resources.
Johnson and his School’s approach to strategy evaluation suitability, acceptability and feasibility, resources relate to the feasibility of a project. If a resource is not available, either that plan will have to be changed or abandoned, or the resource must be found.
Many resources are relatively easy to define and come with known, stable properties, such as material of a certain quality or machinery with a promised performance. However, human resources can be problematic and increasingly difficult, to obtain successfully and reliably. This is because:
1. Defining desired behaviour and measuring employee performance is often challenging.
2. Employees are complex, dynamic creatures with changing enthusiasm, preferences, skills, motivation, boredom levels and personal problems.
3. Employees can choose to leave.
4. In many countries, population changes mean that there are fewer people available to recruit employees from customary sources.
5. most jobs have higher technical content. Jobs that once made use of relatively stable skill-sets, such as Technicians and electricians, now require constant retraining to stay up-to-date with regulations and other developments.
6. In economies where there has been a move away from manufacturing to service provision, more employees come into direct contact with customers the ‘people’ part of the extended marketing mix. Therefore, if those employees are poor performers they can do instant harm to an organization’s reputation. In manufacturing, poor employees can be ‘hidden’ in factories and the products they make can be inspected before delivery.
7. There are many fewer jobs for life and if people move on regularly, there is a greater recruitment burden.
8. Employment protection legislation can make it a difficult, and costly process to dismiss unsatisfactory employees. It is, therefore, important to get recruitment right and, where necessary, to enable employees to improve their performance to a satisfactory level.
STRATEGIC HUMAN RESOURCE MANAGEMENT
Ideally, strategic human resource management will form one component of the linear rational planning approach: analysis, choice, implementation. This will probably be the case where a rational plan has significant impact on the human resources needed. For example:
Take-over a competitor to gain market share, gain economies of scale and reduce competition
Plan and put into effect redundancies as operations are merged and synergies sought. Encourage teamwork from remaining employees.
Expand into Developing Countries by setting up a manufacturing and distribution company there.
Recruiting suitable local employees. Move managers abroad to run the operation.
Move organization chain up-market to escape fierce competition and earn higher margins.
Decide what skills are needed in the industries. Recruit suitable staff; evaluate the skills of current staff and provide training. Possibly redeploy current staff into other roles.
In practice, the people who are managing human resources are themselves part of the human resource asset base and will be aware of a political dimension: power, promotion and status. Undoubtedly these understandable and probably unavoidable human factors can interfere with the rational approach. More so human resource management is more at risk from ‘bounded rationality’. This is our inability to be completely rational because we can’t know everything that we need to know to make rational decisions. At least when you buy a machine you can predict well its life-time cost, performance and maintenance periods, and you can be confident that it won’t suddenly move to a competitor. Little of that is true with human resources.
The human resource planning approach described is essentially a position-based approach: discover what’s happening in the environment, then adjust what the organization does to suit that environment. However, given the competencies that might be possessed by many employees, it is important not to neglect the resource-based approach.
For example, employees:
1. Could possess valuable knowledge and this is often the difficult-to-discover tacit knowledge
2. Will have formed business relationships with suppliers and customers
3. Might possess unique or scarce talents
4. Should have formed effective, motivated multi-skilled teams.
These can be the source of difficult-to-copy competitive advantage. Although employees might gain these attributes spontaneously, it is very important to recognize the contribution that good management can make to creating a human resource which is valuable, possesses core competences, is difficult to imitate and which is long-lasting. What
Management can influence:
1. Recruitment
2. training and development
3. job design
4. leadership and motivation.
Without carrying out these steps successfully it is unlikely that the capabilities arising from human resources will be more than threshold capabilities.
Classic Recruitment Steps
The classic recruitment steps begin with:
1. Human resource planning: How many people? What skills? When? Where?
2. Job analysis: What is the job? What will the person be doing? A job title, such as ‘Accounts Assistant’ can mean very different things in different organizations. Job analysis researches what tasks the job entails and this will point the way to the competences a successful recruit should possess.
3. Job description: This is the result of the job analysis.
4. Person specification: This describes the attributes, such as experience, qualifications and personality, that a successful holder of the job must possess.
The person specification could be expressed in a competency framework. Competency is ‘the set of behaviour patterns that the employee needs to bring to a position to perform its tasks and functions with competence’. Competency frameworks draw together the competences needed for the stated job.
Competency framework that might be relevant to the recruitment. Note that the competency framework will be useful at the following stages of an employee’s career:
1. Recruitment: how does the candidate’s current performance compare to what is needed. Sometimes it will be essential that new employees come with full-fledged competences, but sometimes they could be employed in the hope that competency gaps can be made good.
2. Training and development: in areas where actual performance is below required performance.
3. Discipline: where employees are required to improve to meet the required competence.
4. Promotion: where candidates have shown competences for a higher position.
For the sake of completeness, the remaining stages of the recruitment cycle are:
1. Attract candidates and create a short list for interview
2. Interview (and consider testing ability, aptitude and personality)
3. Offer and acceptance
4. Take up references
5. Induction training to make the new employee comfortable and productive as soon as possible.
JOB DESIGN
Job design can be defined as the process of deciding on the contents of a job in terms of its duties and responsibilities, and on the relationships, that should exist between the job holder and the superior, subordinates and colleagues.
These are a number of approaches:
1. The scientific approach
This approach is associated with Frederick Taylor (1856–1915). Taylor believed that many workers went about their jobs inefficiently and without management direction as to the best way to accomplish tasks. He believed that it was management’s duty to investigate tasks and to arrange them in a scientific way that minimized wasted effort and maximized efficiency. The results of his studies in search of efficiency were that:
1. Jobs were fragmented into simple tasks
2. Manual workers simply had to get on with their simple, repetitive task and leave decision making to managers
3. The skill in each job should be minimized
4. The arrangement of machines should be such to minimize material and people movement.
The approach was soon adopted enthusiastically by Henry Ford whose factories were based on mechanized production lines which determined the speed at which work had to be completed. It enabled the production of standard products at lower cost.
2. Job rotation, job enlargement and job enrichment, the scientific approach to management resulted in high productivity and allowed workers’ wages to increase. However, it was criticized because it often turned employees into automatons, condemning them to mindless tasks and driven by the speed of the production line. Job satisfaction, motivation and pride in their work decreased. Often labour relations and quality were bad and commitment to employers was low.
These problems gave rise to a recognition that job design should also pay attention to the employees’ social and psychological needs. This is the human relations school of management. Employees get bored, so more variety in work could be useful; employees like being challenged; employees like feeling they are contributing something worthwhile. This realization gave rise to attempts at job redesign where managers aimed to produce ‘better’ jobs. Methods available are:
1. Job rotation. This is a horizontal change in the job, meaning that a worker is regularly moved from one simplified, de-skilled job to another. This should reduce worker boredom (at least for a while).
2. Job enlargement. Another horizontal change, but each job now consists of several unskilled tasks.
3. Job enrichment. This is a vertical change in which some of the tasks previously carried out by managers and supervisors are added to the job. For example, in addition to repetitive construction tasks the employee could now also be required to assess and report on the quality of the item.
Of the three, job enrichment holds the most promise of long-term increases in job-satisfaction. It must be pointed out, however, that managers often do not find it easy to relinquish managerial control to their subordinates, so that frequently the apparent delegation of power is accompanied by increased monitoring of performance. In many organizations job enrichment might therefore be an illusion perpetrated by managers to try to keep employees happy, but without giving them any worthwhile discretion.
3. Japanese management, in the 1970s and 1980s Japanese manufacturing companies were world-leading. Companies such as Sony, Mitsubishi, Panasonic, Canon, Nikon, Toyota and Nissan usually beat their western competitors. Because of that success, much attention has been paid to Japanese management approaches. Much of the pioneering work was done in Toyota and resulted in their Toyota Production System. This approach is also known as ‘lean manufacturing’ and it concentrates on eliminating any activity and expenditure that does not add value to the finished product or service.
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