Strategic Human Resource Management
This paper explores the importance of strategic human resource management (SHRM) as part of corporate business strategy in the service organisation & its relationship with various employment policies. Coaching will be exercised throughout this paper as a key policy and from this its linkages with empowerment & flexibility within the process of managed learning will be developed. The gaps that currently exist between human resource (HR) specialists, business executives, line managers and employees will be exploited and finally recommendations shall be made for action.
Leopold, Harris & Watson provides us with a fine definition of SHRM; ‘Strategic human resourcing is about shaping the human dimension of the organisation as a whole and taking the enterprise forward towards a healthy long term future’(1999, p1). People costs are between 60-80% of overall organisational costs (Chapman 2004). SHRM should therefore be part of the investment process of corporate strategy to avoid poor and costly use of resources. Unfortunately, this is not the case for many organisations. There is rarely a long term strategy implemented across all levels of the work place. The overall business strategy must be combined with the day to day managing operations, creating a dualistic approach.
Most organisations involve customer interaction at some point, this transforms the workplace relationship into a triadic structure between employee, employer and customer (Johnson and Coupe 1999). Organisations must see the business relationship in such a way and aim to bring each point of the triangle closer towards the shared vision which lies in the middle. It is t ...