A growth plan is hatched in a boardroom with the guidance of C-level
executives and high-level managers. Too often, human resources staff
is not invited during the early stages of
the plan. But business growth is intrinsically linked to its human capital, says
Michael Manser, Vice President of
Human Capital Solutions for Talent Tree
of Houston.
“Executives need to realize that a company’s strategic plan will always be
linked to human capital resource planning ” he says. “You can’t just say, ‘We’re
trying to grow X percent, and we’re hoping everyone will pull together and do
more.’ That just doesn’t happen; hope is
not a plan.”
Smart Business spoke with Manser
about the importance of taking resource
planning, hiring issues and organizational goals into consideration when putting
forth growth plans for your company.
What are some of the obstacles businesses
face when trying to align a growth plan with
their human resource plans?
Your company’s organizational strategy
will drive your business goals, which
will, in turn, drive your work force planning. When there is a business goal to
grow, say, 10 percent over the course of a
year, do you know how many employees
you need to hire? What type of employees you need to hire? What the timing of
these additions needs to be to attain your
goals?
Could you explain what you mean by ‘organizational strategy’?
An organization’s strategy captures its
position in the marketplace as perceived
by its customer base. In his book ‘The
Workforce Scorecard,’ John Huselid gave
a simple but powerful model of the three
basic strategy groups most every company will fit in: operational efficiency, product expertise and customer intimacy. For
example, companies like McDonald’s
and Wal-Mart have an organizational goal
of operational efficiency — that is, their
revenue comes from being efficient in
delivering an inexpensive product to the
most people. Companies with a product
expertise strategy rely on product quality
that is literally synonymous with their
brand, such as Harley Davidson, Apple
and Microsoft. The third type of company, customer intimacy relates to service
or an experience that a customer gets for
his or her money, such as the experience
of shopping at Nordstrom, or how you
visit Ace Hardware because ‘Ace is the
place with the helpful hardware man.’
Depending on how a company’s organizational strategy works will drive how a
business chooses, and compensates, its
work force.
For example, a perfume company with
a product expertise organizational strategy will approach how to achieve a 10 percent growth much differently than if it
operated under one of the other two
models because its revenue depends on
creating unique fragrances for its competitive advantage and growth. So, it may
opt to spend its growth budget on hiring
the best qualified chemist to create new
fragrances, rather than high-end sales-people, or procuring inexpensive ways to
get raw ingredients.
Once you have revisited your business strategy and organizational goals, what’s next?
Do you anticipate that the performance
results of your staff will achieve the new
company’s objectives? Does your hiring
plan take into account the learning
curve? Should you hire sooner rather
than later to get performance results up
quicker? Do you have enough recruiters
to accomplish your goals? Do you have
enough money to hire these new employees? Where will you physically put these
employees? Do you have enough offices,
desks and computers?
What happens when businesses don’t go
through this process of lining up growth
plans with organizational goals and hiring
needs?
Without connecting the strategy to the
hiring plan, you won’t achieve the
results. This failure will show up in a
variety of ways; for example, while a
business may know how many employees to hire, it may not know which ones
are essential to its bottom line. Or, it may
know the right employees to hire, but it
may not have the resources to hire them
or a place to put them once they are
hired.
Where does this process need to start to
avoid these mistakes?
HR and finance personnel need to be
involved right at the beginning of a
growth plan in order to avoid the disconnect between strategic goals and the hiring plan. Business executives, from the
start of planning for growth, need to ask
their team: How do these growth goals
relate to hiring? And, how can HR and
the work force help achieve those goals?
Integrating HR executives into the strategic planning process will ensure a connection to the engine that drives your
company — the work force.
MICHAEL MANSER is the Vice President of Human Capital Solutions for Talent Tree, based in Houston. Reach him at (713) 361-7303
or by e-mail at [email protected].
