Role of Strategic Management in HR?

Answer: Strategic management process involves four important stages: environmental scanning,

strategy formulation, strategy implementation, and evaluation and control.

Environmental Scanning:
HR professionals play key roles in scanning the environment. More specifically HR can provide
the following:
“From public information and legitimate recruiting and interview activities, you ought to be able
to construct organization charts, staffing levels, and group missions for the various
organizational components of each of your major competitors. Your knowledge of how brands
are sorted among sales subdivisions and who reports to whom can give important clues as to a
competitor’s strategic priorities.

Strategy Formulation
1)Corporate-level Strategy:
Corporate-Level Strategy refers to the top management’s approach or game plan for
administering and directing the entire concern. These are based on the company’s business
environment and internal capabilities. It also called as Grand Strategy.
It reflects the combination and pattern of business moves, actions and hidden goals, in the
strategic interest of the concern, considering various business divisions, product lines, customer
groups, technologies and so forth.

2)Business-level Strategy:
Business-level strategy is an integrated and coordinated set of commitments and actions the firm
uses to gain a competitive advantage by exploiting core competencies in specific product
markets. It indicates the choices the firm has made about how it intends to compete in individual
product markets. Namely, the choices are important because long-term performance is linked to
a firm’s strategies. Given the complexity of successfully competing in the global economy, the
choices about how the firm will compete can be difficult.
Moreover, the purpose of a business-level strategy is to create differences between the firm’s
position and those of its competitors. To position itself differently from competitors, a firm must
decide whether it intends to perform activities differently or to perform different activities.
Strategy defines the path which provides the direction of actions to be taken by leaders of the
organization.

3)Functional-level Strategy:
Functional service strategy can be defined as the everyday strategy which is formulated to help
in the application of business and corporate-level strategies. Usually, top-level management
provides guidelines to form a functional-level strategy.
A functional level strategy is directly associated with decision making at the operational level,
which is also known as tactical decisions. These tactical decisions are used for various functional
areas such as marketing, manufacturing, research and development, human resources, finance,
logistics, etc.

Strategy Implementation:
Strategy Implementation refers to the execution of the plans and strategies, so as to accomplish
the long-term goals of the organization. It converts the opted strategy into the moves and actions
of the organisation to achieve the objectives.
Simply put, strategy implementation is the technique through which the firm develops, utilises
and integrates its structure, culture, resources, people and control system to follow the strategies
to have the edge over other competitors in the market.

Strategy Evaluation:
The strategic managment process results in decisions that can have significant and long-lasting
consequences. The erroneous strategic decision can inflict severe penalties can be exceedingly
difficult, if not impossible, to reverse. Strategy evaluation, therefore, assumes greater relevance.
Strategy evaluation helps determine the extent to which the company’s strategies are successful
in attaining its objectives. Basic activities involve in strategy evaluation are:
1. Establishing performance targets, standards and tolerance limits for the objectives, strategies
and implementation plans.
2. Measuring the performance in relation to the targets at a given time. If outcomes are outside
the limits, inform managers to take action.
3. Analyze deviations from acceptable tolerance limits.
4. Execute modifications where necessary and feasible.