Strategic competence

Business insight

Implementation infrastructure

Results assessment

A successful human capital management strategy

Business insight

HR must be involved in setting the business strategy, which becomes the key input informing the HCM strategy. When HR helps to create the corporate strategy, they are intimately aware of what should drive HCM plans. Just under two-thirds of HR functions surveyed in APQC’s Open Standards Benchmarking database do indeed help formulate corporate strategy. These organizations leverage this experience to create HCM strategies that consider: the organization’s long-term objectives, corporate and business unit strategies and senior management directives (Figure 1). Employee surveys are also common inputs, with nearly three-quarters of organizations in APQC’s Open Standards Benchmarking database using them in setting HCM strategy. At Philips Healthcare, the HR function identifies strategies at the business unit level. The director of integrated talent management works with business unit leaders and their management teams to clarify their strategies and develop plans to develop workforce capabilities to reach strategic goals. With workforce capabilities recognized as a primary business asset for delivering the value proposition, strategic capability planning helps the business understand what HR can deliver. Because of this coordination, HR delivers better value, efficiency and effectiveness to the business. In another best-practice example, HR and business leaders at Kaiser Permanente Northern California come together to understand the current and desired future state of the business. Then, HR and business leaders turn their attention to the implications of changes. Once the risks are identified, it is possible to identify specific workforce strategies, prioritize them and make a business case for the most critical ones. To create an HCM plan, the workforce planning team then works with its business partners and HR to craft specific, actionable and relevant workforce strategies.