Human Resources (HR) Professionals have to tackle multiple concerns at one time, and must frequently move their practices from transactional to strategic.
A significant part of being strategic is having the ability to conduct environmental scanning. Understanding environmental scanning and the influences external to your organization, is critical to business and HR success.
Wayne Brockbank explains the impact of the external environment on successful transformation and strategic HR, in the video clip below.
Source: The RBL Group https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dIVSGhXFzLI. The above content constitutes a link to the source website. Please click on the play icon to stream the video.
According to Wayne Brockbank, one way to ensure your organization has a powerful HR strategy is to have all five of these elements:
- A strategic plan must be sustainable in the long term
- The HR plan has to add substantial value that is greater than the competitors are offering
- The HR strategy must be comprehensive and not just covering pieces of the organization
- The plan must integrate the organization and make the firm whole
- The plan must translate into specific executable actions
This is actually a very good HR strategic checklist; however, most HR departments don’t come close to meeting more than one element when it creates its strategic plan. The next time you want to assess the effectiveness of your HR strategic plan, use the above checklist to measure the quality of your plan.
Discussion Questions:
- Take each one of the above elements and describe how you would make it happen?
- How would you influence your HR Director to follow Wayne Brockbank’s five elements?
- Out of the five elements which ones do you feel HR drops the ball on most frequently?