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Paper 1 - Business Strategy and HRD

Question 1:

What is the link between Organization strategy, Talent strategy and Training strategy?
Support your answer with some examples.

Answer:

Organizational strategy:

An organizational strategy is the sum of the actions a company intends to take to achieve long-term
goals. Organizational strategy defines how a company allocates resources to support infrastructure,
production, marketing, and inventory and business activities. It also depicts the goals and objectives
which the organization would like to achieve in a specific time frame.

Organizational strategy comprises of 3 major levels

1. Corporate level strategy.

This level defines the foundational question of what a company wants to achieve. Is it growth, stability,
or retrenchment?

2. Business unit level strategy.

This level focuses on how an enterprise is going to compete. Will it be through customer intimacy,
product or service leadership, or lowest total cost?

3. Functional level strategy.

This strategy level focuses on how a company is going to grow. Will it be through market penetration,
market development, product or service development, or diversification

Talent strategy:

Talent strategy is the full scope of systematic HR processes to attract, onboard, develop, engage, and
retain high-performing employees for a long-term association. This means that talent strategy is aimed
at improving business performance. Talent strategy is actually an important one as 33% of revenue is
directly linked to the loss of talents of an organization. It is concerned with managing and retaining best
and talented employees in the organization.

A Five-Step Approach to Creating Talent Strategies.

1. Create Alignment with Business Strategy.

2. Identify the Role of Organizational Structure.

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3. Identify Pivotal Roles.

4. Define Success Profiles with Precision.

5. Make the Buy-Versus-Build Decision.

Six Obstacles to Creating Effective Talent Strategies:

1. Lack of courage to abandon business-as-usual.

2. Absence of capabilities within HR to deliver on talent strategy.
3. Inadequate attention to external influences.
4. Unoriginal talent strategies.
5. No horizontal alignment of talent processes.
6. Failure to consider the impact of culture.

Training strategy:

Training strategy is built to achieve an educational goal in an organization. To succeed, employees’ skill
sets must be complete and up-to-date. Employee development is one of the most important
investments a company can make in the business. While taking training, companies have to be sure
about spending money wisely. It’s therefore best to create an overall training strategy to steer plans for
staff development. Creating the training strategy should imply and involve the current skills set of the
employees and also consider the future technical skill requirement which will help the growth of
organization and employee as an individual.

Importance of Employee Training:

1. Employee behavioral training can help you enhance the working standard of your organization. It will
improve the respect between employees and will tend to create a friendly environment at your
workplace.

2. Your employees should be able to lead and follow with the same efficiency. There are leadership
training sessions which can improve the leadership quality of your employees.

3. Peer training is used to give your employees a hands-on experience of new expertise.

4. It can teach you about every relationship you’ll have during your employment; client to the client
relationship, a service provider to service recipient, employee to employee, upper management to lower
management, etc.

Relationship between Organizational strategy, Talent strategy and Training strategy.

Cross relationships

1. Organizational strategy is the prime strategy over which the businesses run while talent strategy is a
part of organizational strategy and training strategy is a part of talent strategy.

2. Organizational strategy will have a vision and mission, aligned with which the talent strategy is
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framed.

3. Talent strategy falls under the section of functional level strategy of corporate strategy.

4. Training strategy is the execution level strategy for talent strategy.

5. Talent strategy and Training strategy are concerned with the people, skill and up gradation of the
employees and staff.

6. The Training and the talent strategy help out the organizational strategy achieve its success.

7. Organizational strategy is which helps out the talent strategy and training strategy to get helped in
itself by providing the appropriate resources and energy for its success.

Loss due to the organizational strategy not meeting the training strategy and talent strategy.

1. The companies will have higher attrition rates.

2. The talent pool of the company will become lesser.

3. The company cannot hire the right talent and the loss that would be incurred due to the loss would be
around 33% of the net revenue.

4. The organization would face lots of delivery failures, accidents.

5. The company and the products would lag on the product launches and would be left behind their
competitors.

6. The cutting-edge products and breakthrough innovations are possible, when there would be proper
training and products would be available.

Examples 1

A company “ABC” will have an intact organizational strategy and goals. Obviously, talent retention and
training the employees with the updated skills will be a part of its organizational strategy

1. If the company should make the bigger organization goals to thrive and improve, it has to set the ball
rolling with many factors.

2. One such factor is the talent retention and training methodology. Here is where the link between the
three strategies work and come into picture.

3. For the company to produce the required revenue and meet the objectives, the talent strategy has to
work taking the help from training strategy.

4. As per the reports 33% of the revenue shall be affected by attrition and abrupt talent exit.

5. Now, the track is very clear. When there is a good organizational strategy, there will be an official
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support for the right Talent strategy for retaining the right talent.

6. When there is the right “Talent strategy”, the appropriate training strategy will be set.

Examples 2

A company “XYZ” whose objective is to build a great product with advanced Digital technologies would
be interested in building a great product in artificial intelligence (AI).

1. Now, building the product in AI becomes a part of organizational strategy. Organizational strategy is
the direction where the company and the business are moving towards.

2. The objective is clear. For building the AI product, there is an obvious need for AI engineers who are
educated and equipped with the technology.

3. Identifying the vacant position, recruiting the right candidate with the required skill, training the
candidate with the appropriate skill and efforts to retain the hire becomes the talent strategy.

4. Now, the appropriate execution of training for knowledge improvising becomes the “Training
strategy”.

The downfalls

1. When there would be no proper “Training strategy”, the coaching of the employee goes wrong, which
in turn would lead to the nonperformance of the employee as when the project demands.

2. When the non-performance creeps in, the delivery of the organization gets affected.

3. When the productization and delivery of the organization suffers the organizational strategy gets
affected.

4. Downfall line is like this. Poor training strategy leads to poor talent strategy which in turn leads to
poor organizational strategy.

Examples 3 - Honeywell Technology Solutions:

The technology giant Honeywell Technology solutions, entered India in 1995. The company was set up in
India by Dr Krishna, Mikkilineni.

1. Honeywell, which was a subsidiary of Honeywell – USA, did not start the production operations right
from day 1.

2. The initial 6 months – 1 year was utilized by Dr Krishna, Mikkilineni for educating and training the
team on products and policies.

3. It is very clear that Dr.Krishna wants to set up a great organizational strategy , still wants to set the
talent strategy and training strategy to be up and running.
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4. Honeywell started the operations after setting up the talent and training strategy well.

5. This shows the relationship between the proper organization strategy, talent and training strategy.

6. Dr.Krishna believed that the talented workforce is very important than to have the ways to generate
the revenue by executing projects.

7. Hence setting up the talent strategy and training strategy became the paramount importance.

8. Hence relationship between the organizational strategy, talent strategy, training strategy is displayed
with a real-life example.

Examples 4 - White Hat Junior:

1. Whitehat.Jr. is an Edu-Tech company specializing in coaching and educating kids on the coding space.

2. The company`s organizational strategy is to conquer the space of education (Edu-Tech) in particular.

3. The organizational strategy of this company is to harness the space of kid’s education and help them
understand and learn coding at a young age in particular.

4. The talent strategy that they have built or building is to acquire and hire teachers (Online Teachers),
who can coach the kids on coding.

5. The training strategy is to build the system, where there is one to one coaching available for the
students and kids.

6. This is a perfect example as how an organizational strategy has given rise to Talent Strategy and in
turn leading and giving rise to Training strategy.

Examples 5 - Nokia Mobiles

1. The Finnish giants in the field of mobiles were the world leaders in the until the world changed to the
era of smartphones.

2. Smartphones were the breakthrough technology that was making the entry, when NOKIA was busy
with their conventional phone productions.

3. The organizational strategy which never concentrated on the futuristic technology learning and
development lost to its competitors.

4. The organization never concentrated on the development of Talent Strategy and Training strategy,
which ultimately failed to launch the futuristic technologies.

5. Due to the poor talent and training strategy, NOKIA lost itself in the field of smartphones and the
market leader position too.

What is in store for the future?

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1. The future holds fortune for every one of us, including the corporate training strategy.

2. The conventional work that is happening around shall be replaced by machines. The future is in
appropriate training and training the workforce for the futuristic jobs that are about to be created.

3. Organizational strategies are going to allocate major budgets and resources to the training-oriented
activities.

4. The training strategy and the talent strategy in line with the organizational strategy has to become
more digital.

5. The nature of training and the TNA and the Training delivery shall be more apt to the current trends.

The main link between these strategies is managing humans as a resource in the organization.

For an organization to achieve its strategic goals and objectives, these strategies need to be aligned.

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