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        STRATEGY AND PEOPLE
　　A discussion of the challenges of people when considering business strategy
　　An organisation’s resources. will probably contribute to most of the weaknesses and strengths in a SWOT analysis. Many, but not all, resources can be remembered by using the ‘M’ words: money, manufacturing, material, marketing, machinery, methods, management information, management, and men and women. Management, men and women can be called the organisation’s human resources.
　　In the Johnson and Scholes approach to strategy *uation (suitability, acceptability and feasibility), resources relate to the feasibility of a project. If a resource is not available, either that plan will have to be changed or abandoned, or the resource must be found.
　　Many resources are relatively easy to define and come with known, stable properties, such as material of a certain quality or machinery with a promised performance. However, human resources can be problematic and increasingly difficult, to obtain successfully and reliably. This is because:
　　· Defining desired * and measuring employee performance is often challenging.
　　· Defining desired * and measuring employee performance is often challenging.
　　· Employees are complex, dynamic creatures with changing enthusiasm, preferences, skills, motivation, boredom levels and personal problems.
　　· Employees are complex, dynamic creatures with changing enthusiasm, preferences, skills, motivation, boredom levels and personal problems.
　　· Employees can choose to leave.
　　· In many countries, population changes mean that there are fewer people available to recruit employees from customary sources.
　　· In general, most jobs have higher technical content. Jobs that once made use of relatively stable skill-sets, such as plumbers and electricians, now require constant retraining to stay up-to-date with regulations and other developments.
　　· In economies where there has been a move away from manufacturing to service provision, more employees come into direct contact with customers (the ‘people’ part of the extended marketing mix). Therefore, if those employees are poor performers they can do instant harm to an organisation’s reputation. In manufacturing, poor employees can be ‘hidden’ in factories and the products they make can be inspected before delivery.
　　· There are many fewer jobs for life and if people move on regularly, there is a greater recruitment burden.
　　· Employment protection legislation can make it a difficult, and costly process to dismiss unsatisfactory employees. It is, therefore, important to get recruitment right and, where necessary, to enable employees to improve their performance to a satisfactory level.
　　STRATEGIC HUMAN RESOURCE MANAGEMENT
　　Ideally, strategic human resource management will form one component of the linear rational planning approach: analysis, choice, implementation. This will probably be the case where a rational plan has significant impact on the human resources needed. For example: Element of the rational plan
　　Possible impact on human resources Take-over a competitor to gain market share, gain economies of scale and reduce competition. Plan and put into effect redundancies as operations are merged and synergies sought. Encourage teamwork from remaining employees.
　　Expand into South America by setting up a manufacturing and distribution company there.
　　Recruiting suitable local employees. Move managers abroad to run the operation. Move a hotel chain up-market (3* to 5*) to escape fierce competition and earn higher margins. Decide what skills are needed in a luxury hotel. Recruit suitable staff; *uate the skills of current staff and provide training. Possibly redeploy current staff into other roles.
　　In practice, the people who are managing human resources are themselves part of the human resource asset base and will be aware of a political dimension: power, promotion and status. Undoubtedly these understandable and probably unavoidable human factors can interfere with the rational approach. Additionally, human resource management is more at risk from ‘bounded rationality’. This is our inability to be completely rational because we can’t know everything that we need to know to make rational decisions. At least when you buy a machine you can predict fairly well its life-time cost, performance and maintenance periods, and you can be confident that it won’t suddenly move to a competitor. Little of that is true with human resources.
　　The human resource planning approach described above is essentially a position-based approach: discover what’s happening in the environment, then adjust what the organisation does to suit that environment. However, given the competencies that might be possessed by many employees, it is important not to neglect the resource-based approach.
　　For example employees:
　　· could possess valuable knowledge and this is often the difficult-to-discover tacit knowledge
　　· will have formed business relationships with suppliers and customers
　　· might possess unique or scarce talents
　　· should have formed effective, motivated multi-skilled teams.
　　These can be the source of difficult-to-copy competitive advantage. Although employees might gain these attributes spontaneously, it is very important to recognise the contribution that good management can make to creating a human resource which is valuable, possesses core competences, is difficult to imitate and which is long-lasting.
　　Management can influence:
　　· recruitment
　　· training and development
　　· job design
　　· leadership and motivation.
　　Without carrying out these steps successfully it is unlikely that the capabilities arising from human resources will be more than threshold capabilities.
　　RECRUITMENT
　　The classic recruitment steps begin with:
　　· Human resource planning: How many people? What skills? When? Where?
　　· Job analysis: What is the job? What will the person be doing? A job title, such as ‘Accounts Assistant’ can mean very different things in different organisations. Job analysis researches what tasks the job entails and this will point the way to the competences a successful recruit should possess.
　　· Job description: This is the result of the job analysis.
　　· Person specification: This describes the attributes, such as experience, qualifications and personality, that a successful holder of the job must possess.
　　The person specification could be expressed in a competency framework. Competency is ‘the set of * patterns that the employee needs to bring to a position in order to perform its tasks and functions with competence’. Competency frameworks draw together the competences needed for the stated job.
　　Here is part of a competency framework that might be relevant to an accounts assistant.
　　Note that the competency framework will be useful at the following stages of an employee’s career:
　　· Recruitment: how does the candidate’s current performance compare to what is needed. Sometimes it will be essential that new employees come with full-fledged competences, but sometimes they could be employed in the hope that competency gaps can be made good.
　　· Training and development: in areas where actual performance is below required performance.
　　· Discipline: where employees are required to improve to meet the required competence.
　　· Promotion: where candidates have shown competences for a higher position.
　　For the sake of completeness, the remaining stages of the recruitment cycle are:
　　· Attract candidates and create a short list for interview
　　· Interview (and consider testing ability, aptitude and personality)
　　· Offer and acceptance
　　· Take up references
　　· Induction training to make the new employee comfortable and productive as soon as possible.