How to Identify HR Deliverables From a Strategy Map

Corporate performance is a direct result of employee attitude.

A strategy map is a visual representation of an organization's strategy. It was created by Robert S. Kaplan, Ph.D., a renowned expert on business strategy. Strategy maps depict the relationship between corporate processes -- including those affecting financial measures, customers, internal processes and corporate learning and growth -- and the corporation's strategic goals of shareholder value creation, customer management, process management, core capabilities, innovation, human resources, information technology, organizational design and learning. To identify human resources deliverables, start with a learning and growth perspective on human capital. As you analyze your strategy map for employee involvement in the basic elements of the map, you will compile a list of qualities your human resource department should create through training, compensation and hiring practices.

Instructions

1. Define your employees' interaction with your supply management, production, distribution and risk management. Assess the quality of these aspects of your business by examining the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats associated with each aspect, and how it affects customer business. Then relate employee involvement to discover goals for employee development such as training and hiring.

2. Perform the same analysis focusing on employees' effect on customer management. Focus on the selection or targeting of prospective customers, how they are acquired and retained, and how their business is developed. This results in an understanding of how employees help or hinder your business expansion and presents a set of qualities your human resource department should recognize as goals of training and hiring practices.

3. Analyze your level of corporate innovation. Innovation is a direct result of your human capital; it includes your employees' abilities to recognize opportunities for innovation, and turn those opportunities into assets through research and development, implementation and management. Human resources departments are often considered cost centers, although their hiring practices and management directives directly affect your employees' capabilities for innovation.

4. Examine the impact of your human resources department's application of regulatory and social processes with respect to work environment, safety, health, employment practices and community involvement and outreach. If the human resources department functions from an adversarial attitude as opposed to a mutually cooperative attitude with respect to your employees, it will adversely affect your entire organization.

5. Compile a list of goals and deliverables for your human resources department based on your findings from the above analysis. Include timelines and benchmarks for production and implementation of these deliverables and a method of measuring their success in meeting the goals you set.

Tips & Warnings

• Consider removing the HR department from the cost-center column of your strategic plan and placing it in the revenue-center column. Maintaining a corporate strategy of controlling employment costs can be the basic cause of your company's performance problems.

References

• Rutgers University; Making HR a Strategic Asset; Brian E. Becker et al.
• Organizational Development Portal; The HR Scorecard: Linking People, Strategy, and Performance
• 12 Manage: Strategy Maps -- Kaplan Norton
• Harvard Business School; Developing the Strategy; Robert S. Kaplan et al.

Resources

• Example of a Strategy Map
• Strategy Map Template