AI and Automation in HR Processes and Employee Well-Being in the Digital Age

Editor's Notes

• #2: The Planning Process People make plans every day, often without giving it a thought. We plan our routes to school, what courses to take, and what to do on Saturday night. Underlying all those plans, however, is an often unstated planning process. Once implemented, plans must be evaluated to see if they must be revised to better fit changing competitive conditions.
• #3: Setting SMART Goals Setting effective goals is an essential management skill. Experienced managers have a simple and effective way to check whether their goals are good or not—they use the acronym “SMART.” Good goals are specific (make clear what to achieve), measurable, attainable; relevant (in terms of what you’re setting the goal for), and timely (they have deadlines and milestones).
• #5: Management by Objectives (MBO) The supervisor and subordinate jointly set goals for the latter and periodically assess progress toward those goals. MBO has benefits. It provides a simple process for working through how the goals at each level will relate to those above and to those below. It also capitalizes on the advantages of employee participation. The downside is that MBO is time consuming. These programs often involve numerous meetings among employees and supervisors, and then extensively documenting each person’s goals in various electronic or hard-copy formats. All that takes time.
• #6: In practice, determining what the organization’s long-term, overall plan should be requires some special tools. For example, you need to be able to systematically review the competitive landscape and analyze what your best strategic, long-term courses of action might be. Strategic planning, which we turn to now, provides these special tools. We’ll start with some definitions.
• #7: Managers sometimes formulate a vision statement to summarize how they see the essence of their business down the road. The vision statement is a general statement of the firm’s intended direction and shows, in broad terms, “what we want to become.” Whereas vision statements usually describe in broad terms what the business should be, the firm’s mission statement summarizes its answer to the question, “What business are we in?” Managers often use the mission statement to pinpoint whether and how the firm will vertically integrate, as well as the firm’s product scope (diversity), geographic coverage, and competitive advantage.
• #8: The Strategic Management Process Figure 3-5 sums up the strategic management process. This includes (1) defining the business and developing a mission, (2) evaluating the firm’s internal and external strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats, (3) formulating a new business direction, (4) translating the mission into strategic goals, and (5) formulating strategies or courses of action. Step (6) and Step (7) entail implementing and then evaluating the strategic plan.
• #9: The environmental scanning worksheet in Figure 3-6 is a simple guide for compiling relevant information about the company’s environment. This includes things like economic, competitive, and political trends that have an effect on the company and its strategy for competing in its market.
• #10: The SWOT chart in Figure 3-7 is used in strategic planning by managers to compile an estimate of the company strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats when creating the firm’s strategy. SWOT helps identify the factors that will allow a company to differentiate its product or service from those of its competitors to increase market share and gain a competitive advantage.
• #11: With a concentration (single business) strategy, the firm offers one product or product line, usually in one market. Concentration growth strategies include market penetration, product development, and horizontal integration. A related diversification strategy implies that the firm will expand by adding new product lines and diversifying so that a firm’s lines of business still possess some kind of fit. A conglomerate (unrelated) diversification strategy means diversifying into products or markets not related to a firm’s current businesses or to one another. A vertical integration strategy means the firm expands by, perhaps, producing its own raw materials, or selling its products direct. A consolidation strategy focuses on reducing a firm’s size. Geographic expansion is taking the business abroad.
• #15: Managers use several tools to help them translate the company’s broad strategic goals into specific human resource management policies and activities. Three important tools include the strategy map, the HR Scorecard, and the digital dashboard.
• #16: The HR Scorecard A process for assigning financial and nonfinancial goals or metrics to the human resource management–related chain of activities required for achieving the company’s strategic aims and for monitoring results. Figure 3-14 summarizes this process. Managers use special scorecard software to facilitate this. The computerized scorecard process helps you to quantify the relationships between (1) the HR activities (amount of testing, training, and so forth), (2) the resulting employee behaviors (customer service, for instance), and (3) the resulting firm-wide strategic outcomes and performance (such as customer satisfaction and profitability).