Using corporate committees to strengthen and align strategic Human Resource Management (HRM) practice is touted as a viable option for organizations. The primary goal of using corporate committees is to minimize the problems that arise from alienating HRM departments. Experts suggest the use of corporate committees to make sure that HRM is integrated with line management.
The proponents of corporate committees also propose four main alternatives to this HRM strategy. The author of the corporate committee strategy also notes that this approach does not have the ability to satisfy all HRM scenarios hence the need for alternatives. This essay identifies and discusses the common components of strategic HRM that are present in all the corporate committee alternatives.
The first alternative for corporate committees’ structure involves instituting one senior-level committee. The senior-level committee consists of the vice president of the human resources department and other top-level managers. The use of a senior-level committee aligns with organizational culture. Organizational culture is a vital component of strategic HRM, and it is represented by the structure that seeks to replace various HR committees with a single senior-level committee (Nankervis, Compton, and Baird 23).
A company that uses the senior-level committee approach stands to gain by maintaining its management standards and ensuring better time-management. Organizational culture affects various aspects of a company including HRM (Shrivastava 104). Using senior-level committees to institute HRM policies is directly related to organizational culture.
Another alternative for line managers is to institute an overall taskforce that is responsible for identifying most crucial HR issues in an organization. Consequently, the taskforce institutes separate committees to deal with all the identified issues. The strategy where each committee deals with a separate issue aligns with the need to plan for change. Planning for change is an HRM strategy through which the HR department spearheads an organization’s agenda for transformation (Dyer 260).
In the second alternative to corporate committees, the overall taskforce identifies the areas that require change. However, the task of instituting the identified changes is left upon HR leaders. Planning for change is a basic HRM strategy that is adequately exemplified by the decision to have HR leaders spearhead change in an organization.
The third alternative to corporate committees involves interviewing HR officers with the view of identifying areas that need change (Christensen 96). The feedback that is collected from the HR personnel is then used to formulate HR policy. The HRM strategy that touches on this third alternative is training and development (Huselid, Becker, and Beatty 97). The training and development strategy works under the assumption that all HR policies should be adequately communicated hence the need for staff interviews.
The feedback that is collected from employees should be used to institute positive developments in an organization (Delery 299). Training and development is a viable HRM strategy for instituting periodic updates to HR policies.
Another alternative to corporate committees involves designing a workshop with the view of bringing HR and line managers together. This option ensures that line managers can come up with HR solutions that align with HRM. The HRM strategies that apply to this option are organizational culture and planning for change. Bringing line and HR leaders together is a core element of organizational change. Consequently, this fourth alternative to corporate committees encompasses two HRM strategies.
Works Cited
Christensen, Ralph. Roadmap to strategic HR: Turning a great idea into a business reality, New York: American Mgmt Assn, 2005. Print.
Delery, John E. “Issues of fit in strategic human resource management: Implications for research.” Human resource management review 8.3 (2008): 289-309. Print.
Dyer, Lee. “Bringing human resources into the strategy formulation process.” Human Resource Management 22.3 (2003): 257-271. Print.
Huselid, Mark A., Brian E. Becker, and Richard W. Beatty. The workforce scorecard: Managing human capital to execute strategy, Harvard: Harvard Business Review Press, 2005. Print.
Nankervis, Alan R., Robert L. Compton, and Marian Baird. Human resource management: Strategies & processes, New York: Cengage Learning Australia, 2008. Print.
Shrivastava, Paul. “Corporate strategy: integrating strategy formulation with organizational culture.” Journal of Business Strategy 5.3 (2005): 103-111. Print.