Peoples’ Bank: Linking Business Strategy and Human Resource Management

The role of human resource management is one of strategic partner, administrative expert, and consultant (managing all of the organization’s people related processes strategically). It is the job of hr management in to recognize that decreased turnover, higher employee morale, and involved employees in the decision making process are all optimal in providing key leverage in an organization’s strategic plan. Management integrate strategic hr management with the organization’s strategy formulation. This means that management has searched the organization and its environment for opportunities and initiated projects and decisions to bring about changes that are both advantageous and competitive for the organization. Through this integration, HR policies must “cohere and be accepted across all company policy areas and across all hierarchies in the company”. These same HR policies had to be turned into practices that were used by both managers and employees as part of their everyday work. The hr management role has changed tremendously from being a mostly personnel function, consisting primarily of a lot of paper pushing, hiring and firing, to being totally responsible for the maximization of “human capital effectiveness”. Which primarily creates a better-trained, more flexible workforce that will add more to the bottom line. Peoples’ Bank went through some organizational restructuring in order to stay competitive in the market. As a result of the changes that were made in the Bank’s System, HR Management had to do research and analysis in order to scan the banks new environment to see what types of employees would be needed with the “new strategy’s skill and organizational requirements. This was a use of HR’s information management skills, which was followed by HR’s integration and change skills to manage the organizational interfaces, assess the organizations skills (or the current values of the banks human resource investment), set priorities, anticipate the future, and facilitate the changes. This is an excellent example of HR Management’s role being at every level of the strategic planning process.

At Peoples’ Bank, “massive changes began to take place in the business environment of banking with deregulation and the relaxation of ceilings on interest”. This affected what people actually did with their money and where they actually put their money; and these two factors affected the whole money market system of banking. This especially affected the competition between the different levels of banks (regional, district, and local) for various (but the same) sources of funds.