Executive Summary
This report presents an analysis of the strategic management process in the HR department of the Ministry of Education. My role as a strategic leader in the HR of the organization involves formulating and implementing effective employment-related strategies. The five decision categories to be considered in SMP include strategic competitiveness, risk, and flexibility, as well as internal and external analysis. The factors I have to analyze when formulating a strategy concern the long-term and short-term objectives of my organization, its strengths, weaknesses, external opportunities, and threats.
Besides, performance evaluation is a significant factor to be taken into account. Finally, the conclusions underlining some problematic areas in my organization are drawn, encompassing the issues of motivation, demographics, department cohesion, performance evaluation, and documentation processing updating. To address the presented challenges, it is recommended to implement professional training and development courses, strategic recruitment, programs for knowledge transfer, job descriptions updating, and new software for documentation processing automation.
Introduction
Strategic management process is an integral part of HR management, crucial for successful organizational development. Implementing strategies in an organization may present certain challenges and require special attention. The purpose of this report is to analyze the strategic management process in the HR of the Ministry of Education and its implications for the organization. This report will consider my role as a strategic leader in my organization’s strategic management process and analyze major decision categories in SMP as well as factors influencing the strategy formulation. Also, conclusions concerning the SMP in my organization and some recommendations will be provided.
Discussion
My Role as a Strategic Leader in My Organization’s SMP
I work in the Ministry of Education as a senior workforce planning and recruitment specialist. As a strategic leader, my responsibility is to develop effective operating strategies and maintain high performance through the strategic management process. My role in strategic management in my organization involves the formulation and implementation of strategies for the efficient solution of employment-related issues. My duty is to set the long-term and short-term goals in workforce planning and recruitment in accordance with the mission and the vision of my organization.
Besides, I am responsible for effective change implementation and creating a strong change supporting environment. After identifying the key problems, my responsibility is to analyze the potentially weak areas in the HR and teachers’ performance and formulate the strategy for problem solution. Talents analytics and building a team of key players for the plan implementation is the following important step of my work as a strategic leader. In addition, ensuring the team’s commitment and motivation is crucial to HR strategic management (Rees and Smith 302). Finally, my duty includes collecting feedback and evaluating the process of problem solution for further improvement.
As the control over international recruiting is also a part of my duties, it is essential to provide the alignment with both national and international perspective. Resolution of arising conflicts, prevention of potentially conflict situations, and developing an effective social network among the workforce also constitute a part of my duties, being of high importance in SMP (Rees and Smith 288). What is more, the employer-employee relationship is vital to the successful operation of my organization. Therefore, an important part of my role is to understand how value is created through HR.
Analyzing the remuneration and benefits structure along with the budget constraints in my organization, evaluating labor market conditions, and considering these factors in a strategic plan is a significant part of my job. My task is to balance the employer-employees interests and enhance the ability of my organization to recruit talented teachers. Another aspect of my job is related to employee training and development, including succession planning for the personnel, providing cohesion among the departments, performance evaluation, and teachers’ training courses. All in all, my role as a strategic leader in the HR context is to identify and resolve employment-related issues and to attract talented workers through efficient recruitment and selection.
Five Major Decision Categories I Will Consider in SMP
Strategic management process requires efficient decision making, which includes several important categories to consider. The first major category I will consider in HR SMP in my organization is the competitiveness. Although the Ministry of Education is a public sector organization, it is still important to maintain its competitiveness on the national and international levels to enhance the organization’s ability to recruit the best professionals in the field. It is clear that having a competitive advantage in workforce recruiting is necessary, considering the abundance of private sector educational companies.
The second category to be assessed is the strategic risk. As a strategic leader in HR, I have to regard this decision category from two perspectives: the risk for the organization and for the employees. That means assessing, firstly, the workforce influence on the decision implementation, and secondly, how the decision may affect the workforce. Another category I need to take into account is the strategic flexibility.
It is claimed that the focus on flexibility may have a significant effect on employees’ productivity (Xiu 1335). The decision is to respond swiftly and efficiently to the changes in employment-related context, allowing the organization to adapt to changing conditions (Rees and Smith 197). Additionally, effective decision making in SMP must include internal and external analysis to provide comprehensive data about the current organization’s operations (Morden 78). Assessing the external and internal environment provides a necessary basis for making the best decision.
Factors to Analyze When Formulating a Strategy
Formulating a strategy, I have to analyze a number of important factors to select the best possible course of actions. The first factor to be considered is the objectives of my organization, with the focus on determining the long-term goals. The analysis of this factor will allow to develop a strategy in accordance with the organizational goals and vision (Morden 165). Short-term objectives have to be taken into account as well for better target setting, as the cohesion among the Ministry departments is crucial.
The next factor to be analyzed is the organizational environment, including its strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats, which is referred to as SWOT analysis (GĂĽrel and Merba 996). In the case of the HR sphere, strengths and weaknesses are closely related to those of employees, their experience, qualifications, and personal qualities affecting the performance of assignments. It is essential to make a comprehensive analysis of the human capital of my organization to understand the prospects and possible limitations.
For instance, the demographics analysis demonstrates the increasing number of employees approaching their retirement age, which in the future can create gaps in the workforce. While strengths and weaknesses are internal factors of an organization and are subject to inner control, opportunities and threats are external factors, frequently requiring additional research for proper identification (GĂĽrel and Merba 998). It is a part of strategic HR planning to identify arising opportunities and potential threats, some of which may occur simultaneously, for instance, in the form of legislative changes.
Another factor that I need to consider in order to devise an effective strategy is performance. Collecting and assessing performance data allows to make conclusions about the current and the standard employees’ performance, hence to analyze the situation comprehensively, preventing any unforeseen obstacles in strategy implementation (Bailey 154). However, a certain challenge in performance evaluation in my organization is caused by the absence of regular updating of job descriptions. All in all, by analyzing these major factors and evaluating the alternatives, it is possible to select the best strategy to achieve the particular objective of my organization.
Change Management Process and Steps to Minimize the Resistance
My HR department is in need of new software implementation for HR automation since paper-based processing is quite lengthy and outdated. This change will concern documentation processing and is crucial to enhance the efficiency of the HR department and productivity of the organization as well. To minimize the employees’ resistance to change, it seems necessary to take the steps before, during, and after the change is implemented, ensuring a smoother transition to the new process.
Before the software implementation, the preparation phase defining the change management strategy is essential. The communication process has to be started as soon as possible to create the foundation for further change implementation (Bailey 305). I will provide clear and explicit information about the new software well in advance and explain its benefits, as well as the influence the new documentation processing may have on the employees.
Also, I will provide support for the change by developing the change management team and ascribing roles to the change leaders. I will ensure that they possess the required information about the software to respond to the employees’ arising questions and concerns as a team approach seems crucial to successful change implementation.
The next step is to execute the plans, implementing the change. While introducing the new software, the employees’ will be engaged in the process to enhance their understanding and increase motivation (Bailey 307). I will assign the roles and clarify the responsibilities with a special focus on the employees who are most affected by the change and those who demonstrate the most resistance. The latter will be encouraged to provide their input to the software implementation to increase their engagement in the process. The emphasis will be made on creating solutions for potential worst-case scenarios (Bailey 308).
In the period after implementing the new documentation processing software, the feedback will be collected and analyzed, regarding both positive and negative aspects of the change. Finally, some correction measures might be needed in order to respond pro-actively to arising challenges of the new process.
Conclusions
Analyzing the strategic management process in the HR department in the Ministry of Education, some conclusions can be drawn.
- The attraction of professional candidates, as well as the motivation of the current employees, is a crucial factor in strategic HR recruitment and management, and it requires constant attention.
- The demographics of the organization may present a potential issue in the future, with a high proportion of the employees approaching their retirement age.
- The cohesion between the administrative staff and the teachers appears to have some area for improvement for increasing the effectiveness of the Ministry of Education in the whole.
- Performance evaluation analysis when formulating a strategy seems complicated due to the lack of regular job descriptions updating. Additionally, the employees may face the difficulty of clearly realizing organizational expectations.
- The HR operations related to the documentation processing need updating and require a higher level of automation.
The issues presented above will be addressed in the following section.
Recommendations
To improve the functioning of my organization, a number of measures may be recommended for implementation.
- Increasing the motivation of potential candidates and the current workers will be possible due to the introduction of retraining courses both for the administrative and teaching staff. These courses will give employees the opportunity to improve their skills on a regular basis enhancing their competencies and boosting the performance.
- Addressing the challenge connected with the demographics of the organization will prevent the high costs of wide-scale retraining and urgent recruitment in the occurring gaps. The issue will be solved with the help of strategic recruitment and retraining.
- Ensuring the transfer of knowledge through special inter-departmental training programs will contribute to the continuity of the working process and enhancement of the productivity of the organization.
- Updating job descriptions consistently will allow a better understanding of their responsibilities by the employees and facilitate the performance evaluation process.
- The introduction of the new software will allow to automate the documentation processing, enhance the performance in the organization in general, and save a significant part of the organizational budget.
Works Cited
Bailey, Catherine, et al. Strategic Human Resource Management. Oxford University Press, 2018.
GĂĽrel, Emet, and MerbaTat. “SWOT Analysis: A Theoretical Review.” Journal of International Social Research, vol. 51, no. 10, 2017, pp. 994-1006.
Morden, Tony. Principles of Strategic Management. Routledge, 2016.
Rees, Gary, and Paul Smith, eds. Strategic Human Resource Management: An International Perspective. Sage, 2017.
Xiu, Lin, et al. “Strategic Flexibility, Innovative HR Practices, and Firm Performance: A Moderated Mediation Model.” Personnel Review, vol. 46, no. 7, 2017, pp. 1335-1357.