Business / STRATEGIC PLAN PAPER
Alignment with organizational goals, mission and vision is a key area where the function and success of the human relations department are critical to the full and effective overall strategic plan of the organization. The fact is that this department is the chief enforcer, performer and achiever of those goals, mission and vision of the organization itself. Management merely establishes the direction and other departments only provide support for the attainment of company goals, mission and vision to HR.
HR is critical in the implementation of organizational goals and the realization of its vision and mission with which it must align itself every given day in order to succeed. This is plain in that the very rationale for the existence of human resources – hence its prime function – is to constitute and operate a workforce that will fulfill the goals of an organization (Efron, 2014). The immediate goal today is to make the organization grow. The ultimate is to make it succeed. And the workforce is the main source of that fulfillment, with management merely supplying the direction, monitoring and evaluation of the workforce’s output (Efron, 2014).
Human resources as a distinct and integral department, newly constituted in the last part of the 19th century only, has hardly evolved at present (Efron, 2014). It used to be known as a “personnel” department to oversee the work conditions of women and girls in industries. Its function eventually broadened to include hiring, terminating, attendance, promotion, transfer and pay determination. In the 60s and 70s, motivation, organizational behavior, and employment evaluation were added to the functions. To this day, a typical HR department is described as merely reactive, sadly lacking in creativity or innovativeness and understanding of the business. Experts trace these deficiencies to attending to concerns that do not contribute real value to the organization by way of aligning HR inputs with organizational goals, mission and vision. Speed of hiring, the completion rate of performance review, and the number of managers who are trained are among these concerns. On their own, these do not conduce to organizational growth or profit, yet many HR department continue to delve on voluminous data on these matters during leadership meetings (Efron, 2014).
Alignment with organizational goals, mission and vision is certainly indispensable to HR function because employees are not merely paid individuals but are real business partners (Efron, 2014). They make things happen or not happen. That alignment requires that they speak the very language of managers and business leaders. The HR department is directly in charge of employees and thus directly influential in aligning them with the organization’s goals, mission and vision (Efron, 2014). This is how HR impacts the alignment.
And HR’s alignment with the goals, mission and vision of the organization will inevitably reap the results it seeks and expects. By sufficiently and promptly supporting and recognizing or rewarding all employees for their individual or department accomplishments that contribute to the alignment, the organization’s growth and success are inevitably enhanced. But this is achievable only by solid team effort that can withstand the greatest trials. High performers who assist low performers without need for prompting, pressuring or threats of termination are central actors. Everyone should be imbued with an “organization-first” mentality from the lowest to the highest levels. HR should embed into the employees’ psyche that their work is intimately and completely bound up with the reason for the organization’s existence and operations. HR should then be most encouraging and quickly inclined to recognize and reward the visible and consistent execution of that consciousness into the desired alignment. This alignment is possible only when employees as chief implementors of the organization’s goals, mission and vision, love the organization themselves. Hence, HR should recruit only those who do (Efron, 2014).
WORK CITED
Efron, L. (2014, Aug 18). What organizations need now from human resources. Forbes.
Forbes. Com. Retrieved on March 7, 2018 from
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