Week 2 Learning Log - Exploration and References

Exploration

Measuring an organization's capabilities is a great way of assessing and understanding how well that company can accomplish its strategic goals and direction. This approach will also shed light on the places that the organization should focus on establishing capabilities, and thus positioning themselves to be more productive and effective on a go-forward basis. Capability audits are a well established approach to completing this assessment, and conducting one within the human resource area will identify the strengths of that area, and how those strengths impact organization performance, and set the path for where the department needs to grow and develop. Here are a few of the components of operation that the audit assesses:

• Talent: Understanding how successful the human resources area is at identifying internal talent, attracting new talent and motivating the workforce is an effective way of understanding HR's impact on the human capital assets of the organization.

• Collaboration: One of HR's most essential responsibilities is to cohesively work with every area of the organization in order to help them achieve their goals, and to provide guidance across a variety of HR relevant scenarios. Understanding how effective HR is at collaborating across the organization will determine their effectiveness with each area.

• Efficiency: Every area of an organization is expected to utilize resources responsibly and constantly evaluate ways to improve their operation. Measuring the HR department's ability to operate efficiently is extremely relevant for an organization constantly trying to improve its overall operations.

• Risk: Taking and managing risks is a natural part of any business's operations. How much risk is taken and the relative reward is not equal in every area of the company. Given the potential impact of risks taken in the human resource space, measuring how that department is managing risk is necessary. Minus an appropriate risk oversight understanding, HR can dramatically effect the bottomline in a negative fashion. 

While there are more sections to be reviewed in a comprehensive capability audit of the human resources area, these represent some of the more important spots that should be explored in said audit.

References

Kalyani, M., & Sahoo, M. P. (2011). Human resource strategy: A tool of managing change for 
organizational excellence. International Journal of Business and Management,6(8), 280-286.

• Kalyani and Sahoo in this body of work discuss how the importance of organizational excellence in process and human resources is paramount to business success. They detail ways that human resource departments can incorporate well established measurement tools to benchmark their operations against industry baselines. Their work also includes an empirical analysis of of the different performance levels achieved by companies that employ these approaches versus the performance of those companies that do not.

Mitsakis, F. V. (2014). Human resources (HR) as a strategic business partner: Value creation and risk reduction capacity. International Journal of Human Resource Studies,4(1), 154-170.

• In this article, Mitsakis promotes the value that human resources can provide their organizations if they incorporate procedures and routines related to performance and risk assessments. One of the routines that Mitsakis promotes is conducting capability audits on a defined and regular schedule. The completion of this activity will allow the organization to assess the evolution of their human resource approaches and whether or not they are moving the dial on company performance across a variety of performance metrics.