Question

1.The roles of Human Resources Managers (HRM) have metamorphous over the years to a more strategic function. Identify and explain all of the strategic functions of HRM and discuss the relevance to the Firm.

2. Discuss how the Organization can develop a robust marketing strategy
3. What exactly is a strategy and what does the implementation entail.
4. Change in the organization is very important yet complex to implement in the Company, discuss

Answer 1

1. The roles of Human Resources Managers (HRM) have metamorphous over the years to a more strategic function. Identify and explain all of the strategic functions of HRM and discuss the relevance to the Firm.

Human resources managers were primarily employed to handle labor or industrial relations. They were first used during the manufacturing revolution by Ford and General Motors, where factories needed to employ & manage a large blue-collar workforce which was heavily unionized. An HRM manager's role was to handle labor disputes, employment or pay hike negotiations, intervene between a business and its workforce in the event of a strike. After the manufacturing revolution peaked, it evolved into a more diversified economy that not only comprised of mass production or manufacturing but also comprised of information and technology products and services. This is when a HRM's role began to evolve from labor relations to more a more strategic function that involved recruitment, policy frameworks, appraisals, performance management, talent management.

Strategic HR Function	Relevance to the firm
Labor Relations	Handling labor disputes, employment or pay hike negotiations, intervene between a business and its workforce in the event of a strike. This helps the firm get out of production gridlocks due to labor strikes and negotiate efficiently.
Recruitment	Ensures a continuous supply of talent, retention and reduced attrition for the firm
Policy frameworks,	This allows the firm to offer balanced policies when it comes to areas which are important both the employee as well as the employer like benefits, leaves ( paid and sick leaves)
Appraisals	This allows the firm to gauge the fair value of an employee by asking HRMs to come up with various appraisal programs such as the bell curve rating system or a peer review system or a 360 feedback system.
Performance Management	This allows the firm to measure and quantify the performance of its workforce. Performance management is very closely linked to appraisals, with the only difference being performance management includes an element of training, coaching, etc and performance programs.
Talent Management	Talent management involves mapping the overall organizational talent in order to effectively use a talent for key projects or needs within the firm. Talent management is also often used to groom potential inhouse candidates for key leadership positions within the firm.

2. Discuss how the Organization can develop a robust marketing strategy

An organization can develop a robust marketing strategy by

• Following simple time-proven marketing frameworks like the four Ps of marketing. This involves identifying key factors such as Product, Place, Price, and Promotion in order to formulate a marketing strategy

• Identifying its target market along with its target demographic and psychographics

• Running multiple A/B testing marketing campaigns by identifying which strategy works best for their product or their service

• Ensuring that sales and marketing work in synergy and support each other. This is even more true for B2B businesses, where the marketing team's primary job is to provide their sales force or SDR's or sales development reps with high quality, qualified leads.

• Determining their marketing budget along with their customer acquisition costs or CAC, customer lifetime value or CLTV, customer retention and attrition costs

• Determining their lead velocity rate

• Measuring their conversion rate

• Forecasting their ARR & MRR or annual and monthly recurring revenue with respect to their customer conversion rates

3. What exactly is a strategy and what does the implementation entail.

Strategy in this context could involve an organizational strategy or, a department-specific strategy like a marketing or sales strategy. A strategy is a roadmap on how to achieve organizational or objectives that are specific to a line of business or a project within an organization. Here's what their implementation entails

• Determining the goals of the organization or a specific business unit.

• Identifying all the available resources at hand to achieve those organizational goals

• Creating a roadmap on how to achieve those goals via various options which are known as strategies

• Project management is also a major part of strategy implementation

• Identifying all the key stakeholders in the strategy and designating their roles and objectives

4. Change in the organization is very important yet complex to implement in the Company, discuss

Organizational change is extremely important because they're ever-evolving. Apart from monopolies and duopolies, most businesses operate in a perfectly competitive environment, which is often filled with disruption, price wars, innovation, and new products and services. in order to have the capabilities, capital, resources, and talent to keep up with competition and the markets, organizations are always in the process of changing. The process of managing, planning and implementing this change in an organized manner is called change management.

The reason why change is complex in an organization is that organizations have a careful balance between change and operational consistency. Change and Operational Consistency don't run parallel to each other but run against each other. Another reason why change is complex is that organizations have to balance between macro-level change and micro-level change. Macro-level changes involves changes which are enterprise wide in nature such as mergers and acquisitions while micro level changes are business unit or department specific in nature such as re skilling a sales force to handle B2B sales from B2C sales.