Strategic Human Resource Management Applications - Bluebell Corporation - Case Study Example

Strategic Human Resource Management Applications Executive Summary In the contemporary times of information and communications technology, many organizations and companies experience challenges of management. America business and corporate executives, for instance, endure many problems because of loss of public confidence. Government control and laws in the U.S. serve to improve organizations’ financial performance and accountability. Organizations develop traditional methods to unveil corporate governance theories and the stakeholder theory to organized short-term profits. Organizational management under the leadership of Human resource manager (HRM) has various problems related to managerial duties. They suggest that organizational governance theories of traditional agency and stakeholder theory are primarily inadequate to generate trust within an organization. Employees are attached to their employers and organizations because of the relationship between them and the companies. Organizations require restructuring so that every person can understand authority, individual duties and responsibilities. Organization structure has a perfect way of addressing the issue by forming teams and getting everyone assigned a task. They also help to orient new employees in the company to gain more experience as well as familiarize them with career and succession plans. Various companies have different organizational structure and domains through which they keep their technological background secretive within the company not to leak out for security purposes. Every firm has the goal and missions that are attainable within a time limit and that form the priority for any company. The profitability of an organization would always improve with the employee’s commitment to their tasks in the workplaces. The relationship between the employees, workers and vice –verse should thrive to promote the development of organizational performance leading to increased production. Key Words: Organization, Human Resource Management (HRM), Strategy, Structure, Culture Strategic Human Resource Management Applications Introduction Identification of organizational strategy Many organizations search for the competitive advantage and development in the international economy in various core areas of production and technology. With much concentration on their quest to survive and improve organizational effectiveness, there are many strategies involving the organizational structure. These include the managerial styles, information technology, production process, and marketing and human recourses development. For the perfect pursuit and implementation of these strategies, most well performing organizations regularly restructure the notion of dominating accessible business opportunities for survival. In satisfying the necessity for competitive advantage and continuous change, various organizations are compelled to explore human resource management as a measure to attain organization success (Lussier & Hendon, 2015). Regular development in human resource field and organizational change increases the function to strategic level in an organization. The formulation of strategy is a crucial feature for organization management. An elaborately defined strategy is necessary to ensure perfect development in the goals, mission and visions of an organization. The strategy of an organization entails its goals, missions, visions shared values, and purpose. The elements work in coordination to ensure the strategic development of organizations such as the Blue Bell Ice Cream Company. In essence, visions and missions are the active points of any strategy and the company’s needs them to attain what they are aiming for such as financial development. It shows the main steps a company has to implement to climb to their ultimate goals. The fundamental of Blue Bell Company’s mission is that it enhances the engagements of culture and socialization among employees to attain organizational development. A perfect mission, when appropriately used, becomes inspirational and important to developing a strongly shared organizational culture. In addition, it ensures emotional attachment of employees to their organizations Every organization has values and beliefs driving its employees to perform their work. The core values guide an organization’s board, staff and volunteers in performing their work. Values lead staff and the individuals within the Bluebell Corporation about the legitimate and illegitimate goals often expressed in statement form. The core values of the animal protection movement may include animal protect protection policies, ethical investment policies, and ethical fundraising policies. The purpose of the organizational strategy is chiefly to explore the nature of various organizations and their theories. Organization theory develops from regular study of organizations activities by the organization’s employees and scholars. Organizations theory is practical and enables people to understand, diagnose, and respond to the emerging organizational requirements and problems. Organization strategy can help in designing of the standard strategies and the development of new organizational forms in response to changes in environment. Despite the experience of many organizations and it is possible to turn strategies and plans into individual actions required to produce perfect business performance. Many companies regularly fail to truly motivate their people to work with enthusiasm towards the corporate aims. Several companies and organizations know their roles and strategies required for success. However, it is significant that large corporations struggle to translate theories into action plan enabling the strategy to be successfully implemented and sustained. Diagnosis of organizational alignment to stated strategy Organizational goals and objectives are the preliminary statements providing external direction and organization priorities to setting guidelines for management strategies. In the Bluebell international corporation, the diagnosis alignment provides strategic intent specifically describing how the organizations plan to achieve its goals and objectives. An organization achieves its goals through various ways such as offering the lowest cost in the industry or by growth. An organizational strategy is executed according to set managerial design methods or procedures of the organization. Significant among the management’s responsibility is to design and implement the strategic organizational required in the current market by customers and business models. Strategic organization alignment is strategy driven, and performance motivated with the mission of exploring the implications organizational strategy changing the environmental conditions. Diagnosis identifies organizational problems and performance gaps in the organization’s activities. Bluebell organizational structure alignment has four phases, the assessment, design, alternatives and architectural design phases and implementations. According to the diagnostic theories, the evaluation phases deals with the gathering of strategy, organization and the business environment using archival research, interviews and observations. In the diagnostic phase, the data is organized based on issue categories and fed back to management in a manner that supports validation and learning. Design process passes through a chain of design steps including scale and leverage assessment. The organizational analysis is influenced by the vertical and lateral process structure. Changes of the organization are dependent on the selection from various alternatives worked through discussions because the organizations require a trade-off (Ulrich, 2013). Alternatives function focuses on the advantages and disadvantages of each other, and the frequent organization is finally selected from the best alternatives based on the evaluation. Architecture design and implementation leads to the extended organization architecture design including the precise roles and responsibilities ensuring unambiguous fast decision making to development projects. New organizational structure enhances the design of rewards and metrics and the identification of key responsibilities needed to execute strategy. In this phase, the auxiliary transition plans are developed to promote the development designs stages within the context of a change management situation. Current level of effectiveness Organizational effectiveness is essential for its success in the economy, to achieve increased and sustainable business outcomes organizations need to execute strategy and engage employees. Creation of organizational effectiveness depends on leaders who need concentration on mobilizing their people and management systems including corporate culture and organization strategy enhancement. Organizational effectiveness leads to higher financial performance, customer satisfaction, and employee retention leading to increased business performance of a firm. Essential elements of the organizational effectiveness required in effective performance of an organization include the influences on customers and overall performance of productivity and profitability. Besides, there is management organizational effectiveness framework that elaborates the organizational success in structure and its sequences. Strategy Strategy shows the role, purpose and the premeditated direction that simplifies the work of the organization and its appropriate divisions. Structure, capability and capacity Organization structure is composed of the individuals performing the right duties for specific purposes precisely describing roles accountabilities and company relationships. Leadership In every corporation including Bluebell, leaders have the capability and capacity to drive sustainable business success. They have the potential to manipulate all the activities of the company from its design to production levels and, therefore, having best knowledge of every step of during processes. Blue Bell Company applies leadership skills to promote its organizational effectiveness for its competitive advantage among other competitors, hence enabling it to ensure high returns. It has an organized leadership structure increasing its rate of productivity and customer’s sustenance to elevate its financial credibility. People and system processes Good leaders require the support or assistance of real people and system for them to deliver well to their organizations. Systems functioning within organizations work in collaboration to appropriately perform specific functions such as information sharing, sending messages, and making perfect decisions in the business. Organizational processes and systems are the elongations of leadership techniques creating the organization consistency and trust. Culture and values They include a set of shared basic assumptions about how to behave and conduct work in various organizations in line with the business’ strategy. To achieve particular business plan, Blue Bell company incorporate systems, symbols, and behaviors the leaders and employees adopt for the development of the enterprise. Employee engagement Organizational effectiveness can also be expressed by many numbers of engagements of employees whose hearts and minds are connected with their jobs and their organization. Blue Bell Company remains successful by its employees being satisfied with their current job and their employer motivation to increase their efficiency improving productivity. Employees are also committed to making the organization successful by doing perfect jobs to suite the customer’s requirements. Employees within the company are proud of their organization and the kind of work they perform. All the aspects motivate the employees in the Bluebell Corporation making them to develop positive attitude towards the company and their work. Customer Experience The excellent level of customer satisfaction and loyalty in the Bluebell Corporation is achievable through knowledge of customer needs by the employees. Employees work on the customer feedback to perform the customer requirement within the period. Bluebell being a big organization is committed and environmentally responsible to support the community fulfill their goals by ensuring satisfaction of customers’ needs promptly. The basic HR metrics supporting the organization strategy proposals Because of the increasing importance of human capital in determining organizational effectiveness HRs play vital roles in developing and implementing corporate strategy importantly for organizations. It is a crucial idea for an HR to develop useful metrics and analytics to become a strategic partner in most organizations. Various matrices are available for organizations to gain understanding of and assess the influence of HR activities, in an attempt to change business strategy and performance. The first example of the metrics is the efficiency of the HR function determining how well the HR performs his regular administrative jobs. The most collected metrics to ascertain the HR’s efficiency include the productivity and cost metrics for filling vacant positions. HR metrics also include the headcount ratios and administrative cost per employee. It is important and possible to produce a comprehensive set of metrics to evaluate HR’s administrative activities that effect and evaluate the stand –alone business (Giannakis et al., 2015). Various organizations vary in terms of the cost per employee for HR administrative duties but the cost reduction in the tune of $1,200 to $ 1,600. The second type of HR metrics focuses on effectiveness making sure that HR programs and practices have the intended influence on individuals or projects to which they are directed. In case of training and development, perfect effective HR metrics should offer information about the skillful nature of employees before they perform any project. Bluebell Company continues to drive a large margin of profit because of appropriate application of HR metrics such as cost- per –hire in management. Cost -per –hire It is the most common HR techniques that the employers use to gauge the expense of various activities such as recruiting, training and maintenance. It also includes the time recruiters and employers spend sourcing and interviewing candidates. Activities attract a great number of qualified applicants in organizations because the work is easier as the company does every step of placement procedure. Other factors compounding cost-per-hire metrics are staff time for interviewing candidates. Organizations that constantly bring on new hires whose knowledge, skills and the abilities align with the company’s overall strategy and culture outperform the competition. Companies shows great profits, higher revenue growth and lower turnover when they follow a hiring strategy of attracting and selecting employees. Engagement survey There are various ways of evaluating employee engagement within an organization. Employee engagement comes because of the interest an individual has in his or her jobs, coupled the pride they maintain in the task they perform. Methods to produce metrics in this section are self-reporting and asking employee survey questions eliciting information converted into metrics telling employers how employees are engaged. The most effective way to evaluate employees’ engagement is by asking identical questions the whole year describing the commitment level of employees in a company. Designing a strategic organizational model to address organization issues Bluebell Ice Cream maintains service by keeping quality products because of the maintenance of the perfect organizational structure and employee commitment for good management. The importance of the management responsibility is designing and implementing strategic organization fitting the market demands and the customer’s requirements within an organization. Business competitors may have access to similar information and develop the same business strategies to the rival company making organizational design a powerful strategic weapon. An organization perfectly functions upon its business strategy if the management has designed its ways of competition (Beadles et al., 2015). For the identification of the main organizational points, there are various problems existing including the changes in strategy causing bad alignment with the original organization architecture. Another problem is the requirement to restructure segments of an organization because of competitive pressures in the new technological era. Finally, there is poor execution and organizational effectiveness. Organization models explore the implications of the organization strategy for the organization structure. Architectural design and implementation model of organization structure further promotes organization architecture design with serious roles and responsibilities to ensure straight and fast decision-making. It enables the development of values and norms for cultural alignment with strategy and design of rewards and metrics. For an organizational strategic management alignment, a company creates a performance including cultural management. Leaders must focus identify and agree upon a time of strategic change. The focus is as a pattern to be followed by the Manager to enable them provides correct employee motivation, cognitive support and resources. Organizational model It is a definition of an organization through its framework including lines of authority, communications, duties and resource allocations. Models are motivated by organization’s goals and serve as the operating platform for business activities. Designs depend on the type of the business and the hardships it endures. Models determine the number of employees required and their relevant skills in various organizational tasks (Berman et al., 2015). Organizational model include various elements and units to identify tasks working in collaboration to accomplish specific work process. Design of a strategic aligned organizational model The strategic model has four phases of process illustration, for example, the assessment phase, design phase, and the alternative phase. The assessment phase In this stage, data is collected strategically in business environment using various methods such as interviews, archival research of planning documents and planning performance studies. Data is organized into issue categories and fed back to management in a way promoting validation and learning. In the phase, there is management agreement on vital issues and problems including the causal factors and organizational requirements. Design The design process passes through a network of stages including scale and leverage assessment, the structure of vertical alternatives and lateral activities and structures influencing analysis. Each stage in this process focuses on the strategically execution and the addressing organizational and cultural issues. Alternatives The structural organizational change is based on the selection from various sets of alternatives. The alternatives are mostly conducted through discussions focusing on the advantages and the disadvantages of the other because of the organizational structure trade-offs. Implementation plan for an organizational business strategy Successful organizations local or global have strong established strategic planning schedules. Strategic organizations plans include all the organizational activities such as the mission, goals, priorities and the requirements to accomplish the mission (Hoye et al., 2015). Organization plan helps in the appropriate allocation of human and financial resources efficiently within the company. The project is segmented into different steps. Step 1: The phase deals with the evaluation and understanding of the implementation process of the strategic plan. Challenging elements of the strategic plan are carefully monitored and marked. Any part of the program that is not realistic or necessary is scrapped out to lessen excessive cost incurred during planning. Step2: The stage deals with the vision for implementing the strategic plan by anticipating and planning a series of goals to be achieved. There is an outline or the structure of activities to be completed to reveal what the end product is and establish a clear image of what the strategic plan is intended to solve. Step 3: In these steps, the selection of the team members to assist in the implementation process of the strategic planning is performed. There should be a strong team with a deep comprehension of the purpose of the plan and the processes involved in its implementation. The team leader is selected to encourage and give support to the team in case of any technicality. Step 4: There should be a scheduled meeting with team members and all the personalities involved in the development plan of the model to discuss progressive reports. Presentation of the list of goals and objectives takes place to let the strategic planning team know about the planning advancements. The step reveals the progress of the development plan and its status elaborating any changes required to be made. Establish a reward system that recognizes success through the implementation process. Step5: The stage involves the upper management executives such as the Chief Executive Officer, Managers, senior leaders and employees in the planning development. It is mainly to keep the organizational management aware of all the progressive evolution of the implementation plan and appropriate rectification of prospective changes. Selling of the proposed corporate strategic planning to CEO, Managers, and leadership employees is performed an organized closed-door meeting. All the team members and the involved in the planning process gather with the executive to share the ideas about the development of the proposed plan. Executive has the mandate to rectify and change the previous version of the project to fit in their new proposal strategies. Political implication of the aligned organizational model Various environmental factors can influence business organizations, and it is crucial to make valid decisions for the development of an enterprise organization. Common factors affecting the implementation of any business structure are political, economic, social and technological (PEST).The government always gives political factors influencing much business importance therefore affecting the company activities. All the business corporations should abide by the laws for smooth operations, and the managers must discover how the laws affect their commercial activities. Political activities can extremely influence the development of the business organization in several ways that may lead to a significant loss. Political power changes results affecting government policies at local to federal level and companies must be ready to deal with local and international outcomes in politics. Increment or the decrement of taxation rate could be a political factor because the government may increase taxes for some companies while reducing it for others. Demand patterns of various companies are influenced by the intervention of shifting government interest rates. Politics has a vast impact on the development of strategic organization model because it affects the economic environment; affect the country’s social-cultural environment. Politicians have the ability to influence the rate of emerging technology therefore reducing the rate of organizational development. Political power may interfere with the acceptance of new technology in the society intentionally to reduce rates of organizational development of a particular place (Snell et al, 2015). The political environment is the least predictable element in the business environment because of the changes in government policies attempted by pressure groups. Conclusion The paper elaborates the organizational structure and how it is managed to enable the organizations perform their regular activities promptly. Major elements of organizational adaptation is portrayed and their adjustments to the environment. Organizational cultures of every corporation include all departments and related staff working together in pursuit of customer’s interest to maintain the integrity of the company. Organization structure segments the processes run in bits departmentally to improve quality of production because of specialization. Human resource managers effectively perform their organization’s duties predicting and implementing various important organization management issues. Organizational strategy is an improvement tool in the productivity of in organization because it increases the financial stability of an organization. References Beadles, I. I., Aston, N., Lowery, C. M., & Johns, K. (2015). The impact of human resource information systems: an exploratory study in the public sector.Communications of the IIMA, 5(4), 6. Berman, E. M., Bowman, J. S., West, J. P., & Van Wart, M. R. 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