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Weekly UpdatesAlignment of HR Policies and Practices with Strategic Objectives
Although their mandates are set by external actors, agencies still must interpret their mandates, clarify their missions, and seek agreement among key stakeholders regarding how their missions will be carried out. Statements of strategic objectives, written or unwritten, emerge from these decision processes. The core requirement of SHRM is the alignment of personnel policies and practices with the agency's strategic objectives. Although many examples of alignment have been reported in the literature, no classification system has yet been proposed to capture how alignment is accomplished. In general, the reported examples tend to fall into one or more of the following categories:
1. Adapting to environmental change. This category includes actions taken by the personnel office in response to external events or trends, such as budget cuts, tight labor markets, changing demographic characteristics of workers, and new technologies. During a period of retrenchment, for example, the personnel office can help managers communicate to staff members the reasons behind staff cutbacks and how they will be accomplished, develop and introduce an early retirement incentive program, counsel those who must be laid off about alternative job opportunities, provide stress management programs for those anxious about their jobs or struggling to cope with increased workloads, and explore the use of temporary or contract employees to ease workload burdens. Adaptive responses of this kind may or may not be guided by a formal statement of agency objectives.
2. Building human capacity to support strategic initiatives. Human resources planning is a traditional personnel function. It involves forecasting future staffing needs and taking steps to recruit new employees or train existing employees to meet the forecasted demands. What is unique in the context of SHRM is analysis of the gap between current and required capacity for each new strategic initiative. If an agency has decided to serve a new clientele group, expand services into new areas, or take on an entirely new program, the personnel office can play a strategic role by recruiting new employees with the requisite skills or enhancing the skills of existing personnel through training and development.
3. Changing organizational culture. Many public organizations have followed their private sector counterparts by reinventing and reengineering themselves. Major reform initiatives often require new organizational cultures, cultures driven by different values and requiring different behaviors. Adopting a "customer-service" orientation, for example, has become a common strategic objective in both the private and public sectors. The personnel office can help develop a shared commitment to service quality and customer satisfaction through its employee orientation sessions and training programs. It can also redesign performance appraisal and incentive systems so that employees are rewarded for emphasizing quality and customer service. The personnel office can undertake similar efforts in agencies seeking to move from a process-oriented to a results-oriented culture.[18]
4. Preparing employees for change. Staff members often resist the implementation of major reforms because of implicit or explicit threats to personal security. Thus, in addition to taking steps to develop a new organizational culture, the personnel office can also take steps to prepare employees for impending changes. It can, for example, encourage managers to involve employees in the design and implementation of the new program or reform initiative, help communicate the purposes behind the changes and the benefits to be derived from them, and provide additional training opportunities so that staff members are prepared to function successfully under the new order.
5. Supporting a specific "business strategy." This category, which overlaps with the preceding ones, is distinguished by the selection of a specific business strategy for success. Many of the examples of alignment in the business literature envision this kind of situation. When Marriott, for example, decided to gain a competitive advantage by being "the employer of choice," the personnel office altered its policies and practices so as to attract and retain the very best workers available.[19] Another business strategy is to become "a high commitment" organization. In this instance the personnel office is charged with altering its policies and practices to encourage employee development and empowerment. Indeed, some advocates tend to equate SHRM with the adoption of "progressive" policies designed to boost employee commitment and performance.[20] The common denominator in these business strategies is the belief that human resources are the key to organizational success.
These five kinds of actions are undertaken to achieve vertical integration. Vertical integration is a measure of how well personnel policies and practices, individually and collectively, contribute to organizational objectives. As indicated in Figure 1, horizontal integration is important as well. This is a measure of how well personnel policies mesh with each other in contributing to organizational objectives. The goal is to develop an integrated personnel program in which policies and practices in one functional area do not work at cross purposes with those in other areas.
Changing the Role and Structure of the Personnel Office
The first four requirements of SHRM cannot be satisfied unless the personnel office fundamentally alters the way it does business. An unresolved issue is how to do so. Advocates of SHRM have offered several recommendations in this regard. First, the personnel office must develop the capacity it needs to support strategic initiatives. This means it must develop staff expertise in job design, organizational development, change management, employee motivation, and human resource theory. The personnel staff must also develop knowledge of general management, agency mission, and the specific personnel problems facing managers. Whether this strategic role should be assigned to a special unit within the personnel office or should be expected of all personnel staff remains an unanswered question. Because the strategic and operational roles of the personnel office are contradictory in many respects, performing both roles in an integrated fashion will remain an ongoing challenge.
Second, the traditional control orientation must be superseded by a service orientation. The required line-staff partnership cannot be forged as long as the personnel office is perceived by agency managers as an enforcer of rules and a source of suffocating red tape. According to SHRM advocates, a service orientation can be established by assigning primary responsibility for human resource management to managers and creating service teams comprised of personnel generalists to assist managers in achieving mission-related objectives.[21] Under this proposal, personnel generalists are to perform a service-oriented role both when administering personnel systems such as classification and pay and when consulting with managers about specific personnel problems or objectives. Adopting a service orientation does not require that the personnel office abdicate its responsibility for safeguarding merit, employee rights, and equal employment opportunity. Rather, it means carrying out this responsibility as legal counselors rather than police officers. If the personnel office is to contribute more directly to an agency's mission, shifts in role orientation are important. For SHRM to be implemented successfully, according to NAPA, "the HR staff must believe that their mission is helping the agency accomplish its mission by assisting supervisors in managing their human resources."[22]
Lastly, many advocates of SHRM believe that highly centralized personnel systems must be decentralized and deregulated. Perry and Mesch argue, for example, that the implementation of SHRM is incompatible with highly centralized personnel systems.[23] Possessing unique missions and mandates, and facing unique situations, agencies must be able to tailor their personnel policies and practices to their strategic needs. Centralized personnel systems deny them the flexibility they need. Structural reforms may include reducing the number of centralized personnel regulations to the bare minimum needed to enforce statutory requirements, devolving responsibility for classification and applicant screening to the agency and bureau level, and delegating policy making authority downwards so that agencies can establish personnel policies suited to their individual needs. Advocates of structural reform believe that certain positive effects will follow, including greater flexibility and timeliness in personnel decision making and improved line-staff relations.
In fact, however, decentralization and deregulation may not be a prerequisite for the successful implementation of SHRM. Structural reform efforts tend to encounter serious obstacles and create new problems. For example, devolution of authority means that agency personnel must be trained to handle personnel transactions formerly handled by a central personnel office and new ways must be found to coordinate the efforts of all line and staff officials engaged in performing the personnel management function. Some of these obstacles may prove insurmountable, creating additional redundancies and waste and further undermining agency performance. From the perspective of SHRM, structural reform may not be necessary as long as each agency has sufficient authority and flexibility to align its personnel policies and practiceswith its strategic objectives. This, too, remains an unresolved issue.
An Expanded Understanding of SHRM
What it means to manage human resources strategically can be understood in more than one way. The difficulty with the understanding discussed above is that it lacks an integrated and sustained focus on the organization's human resources. Because it is closely tied to the practice of strategic planning, it envisions the personnel office taking only those actions necessary to support a specific strategic objective. In this instance the role of the personnel office may be strategic but it is also somewhat ad hoc and reactive. In actuality there is much the personnel office can do to advance an agency's strategic interests other than, or in addition to, supporting the initiatives that emerge from a strategic planning process.
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