Strategic Human Resources Management in Government: Unresolved Issues.

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Second, the traditional control orientation must be superseded by a service orientation.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.

An alternative understanding of what it means to manage human resources strategically has been suggested by Eugene McGregor.[24] The role of the personnel office, according to this understanding, is to help "manage strategic resources strategically." It begins from the premise that many, if not most, government jobs are knowledge-intensive, involving the creation of knowledge or the creation of "smart products" through the application of "trained intelligence." Where this is the case, the intellectual capital stored within the workers becomes the critical resource for the organization and must therefore be viewed as a strategic resource. Managing this strategic resource strategically involves determining essential knowledge, skills, and abilities; improving recruitment and selection methods; developing the capacities of all employees so that the agency can respond to any opportunity or threat appearing on the horizon; and fostering employee commitment so that human capital is not lost to other employers. In short, this alternative understanding envisions a personnel office pursuing an ongoing, integrated program for enhancing organizational performance by acquiring, developing, and managing human resources strategically.

With these observations in mind, it is possible to suggest an expanded, two-pronged approach to SHRM in which the personnel office, in addition to helping the agency implement strategic initiatives, also carries out an integrated personnel program guided by a coherent theory or philosophy about what it means to manage human resources strategically. A theory or philosophy of this kind specifies how human resources must be treated, how much money must be invested in developing human capital, the kind of culture and work climate that must be established, and the specific attitudes and behaviors that must be elicited if the agency is to achieve its vision of success. That personnel offices are rarely guided by such a theory has been cited as the primary reason for their low institutional standing.[25] If the personnel office succeeds in developing such a theory in consultation with agency officials and legislative bodies, the next step is to identify and implement appropriate human resource strategies. Six human resource strategies are identified in Figure 2. Although these strategies are neither exhaustive nor mutually exclusive, they nonetheless serve to illustrate the connections between values and vision, desired outcomes, and the programmatic means by which to realize them. Figure 2 Human Resource Strategies HR Strategies Underlying Desired

Values Outcomes Cost Containment Strategy. Containing labor costs by setting salaries at or below market cost- levels, adopting wellness programs and economy effective managed care to reduce benefit costs, and staffing using part-time, temporary, and contract employees whenever possible. Performance Management Strategy. Setting mission- measurable objectives for employees and productivity related making rewards contingent upon performance. results Involvement Strategy. Providing employees, sense of individually or in teams, with considerable ownership; work autonomy, decision-making authority, empowerment enhanced and responsibility for a "complete" task. motivation and

contribution;

employee

commitment

and retention Retention Strategy. Providing the job conditions necessary to retain valuable satisfaction; human resources, including generous need employee benefit packages, pay that is at or above satisfaction commitment market, positive work environment, and and retention family-friendly policies such as flextime and day care assistance. Investment Strategy. Increasing individual personal competence and organizational capacity human competence; by investing heavily in training and development agency development. adaptability;

employee