As organisations reflect on the achievements and challenges of the half-year and start to think about the next year, human resources (HR) leaders who are desirous of adding value to their organisations and want to “get a seat at the table” should be crafting a “business-enabling” HR strategy to drive organisational success.
Again, this is an area where most HR professionals struggle. In the last 15 years, I have facilitated corporate strategy sessions where HR executives were asked to speak about their strategic initiatives. In some cases, their responses have been adequate, but in most cases, they have been disappointing – asking for salary increases and better welfare packages alone, without articulating how to enable the people’s assets to create sufficient value for the customers so that the value created can be passed on to employees as higher salaries and welfare packages.
So, I would like to share some ideas from these experiences, supported by empirical studies that can help well-meaning HR leaders and professionals develop and implement business-enabling HR strategies for their organisations. But before I jump into the ideas, I would like to share a basic theory of strategic human resources management to set the context.
