E-Connect: Human Resources Planning

E-Connect is a leading hypothetical company located in Silicon Valley, California where it focuses on the development and distribution of consumer electronics. The company's 42% of workforce comprises employees aged between 50 and 70 years old or rather, the Baby Boomers generation. Given the changes in the retirement benefits scheme, the company expects mass exit of the Baby Boomers in the following year 2019. Such a mass exit is likely to expose E-Connect to a human capital crisis that it must mitigate in time, especially now that the company has been experiencing exponential growth in the past few years. As the HR leader for the consumer electronics company, the focus is now on three areas of HR planning, including succession planning, talent management, and hiring of new employees in a year's time. The following discussion presents the strategic human capital management for E-Connect that will help the company to prepare for the influx of employees and the exiting of human capital. Included in the discussion are missions, visions, and goals for each part of the HR planning strategy as well as the strategies to achieve the goals. Overall, the plan provides a comprehensive framework that will ensure E-Connect is not compromised by the anticipated mass exit because it treats human capital as a strategic issue and focuses on every touch point of it. 

Overall Mission and Vision 

E-Connect is a consumer electronics company that was conceived with the mission to provide the affordable and revolutionizing consumer electronics that meet consumers' endless list of computing needs. To do that, E-Connect has been focused on R&D as the hatchery for various technologies that continue to revolutionize the consumer electronics market in line with its original mission, eventually gaining loyalty among 23% of Americans today. In line with its long-term vision of becoming the most honorable employer of the 21st century, the HR function will now focus on building a strategic human capital management plan with the following mission and vision: 

Mission : To attract, develop and retrain pool of talent that meets the daily needs of E-Connect while keeping abreast of future changes in the labor market. 

Vision : To be the most preferred employer who remains responsive to employee needs in a continuously competitive labor market. 

Succession Planning 

At a time when a company expects some employees to exit, the primary focus is always on the key role positions because they are what keeps the company functional, up and running. Succession planning as an HR activity refers to the process of ensuring that such key roles are not left unfilled by recruiting and developing employees to fill them. With such a process in place, the organization will not have any key role position open for which there will no employee prepared to fill. The mission, vision, goals, and strategies under succession planning areas discussed below: 

Mission: To ensure the existing workforce is competent enough to take on the leadership roles left behind by exiting the workforce. 

Vision: To become a firm that is resilient to changes in the workforce structure and responsive to such changes in a timely fashion. 

GOALS AND STRATEGIES 

To establish great professional development pathways 

Strategies: 

The goal to establish great professional development pathways will start with assessing the development needs of employees in the company. Conducting needs assessment will be based on the company's improvement plan from which the HR function will base its assessment on certification requirements, adult learning theory, and leaders development levels. Having obtained the needs assessment results, the focus will shift towards establishing professional development pathways using the Professional Development Pathway(PDP) model conceptualized by Lieberman and Wilkins(2006). In general, there are three major pathways that the HR function will consider exploring in terms of professional development pathways, including companywide professional development, content area or team professional development, and individual professional development. 

A companywide professional development standard will be implemented to harmonize the corporate development goals with HR strategic goals. Content area or team professional development standard will ensure that each department is ready for the expected transitions and that there is an adequate pool of potential leaders in each team or content area. Finally, individual development standard will allow the HR department to track and train new leader with the unique ability to customize the growth and leadership plan for each individual employee in the company (Cronk, 2011). Three ways to achieve the development needs across the three pathways will include training activities, inquiry activities, and individually guided activities. Examples of training activities that the HR department has determined to be essential include use of technology, crisis plans, and intervention measures in key roles. On the other hand, the company will focus on cognitive coaching, critical friends groups, mentoring, observation, and cooperative learning as some of the inquiry activities. Action research and workshops will also suffice as individually-guided activities in this succession planning initiative in preparation for the anticipated mass exit. 

To create a thriving and positive company culture 

Strategies:  

Under this goal, the strategy will be to first ask what values are central to E-Connect and these include responsibility, integrity, innovation, and cooperation. As such, the HR department will liaise with other departments to implement a three-strategy approach to ensuring that the cultural values are shared among all teams and that the values impact the day-to-day operations. The first strategy will be to be transparent and set clear expectations to create a cultural identity through a simple and an easy-to-articulate vision (Cohn, 2014). The second strategy will be to ensure consistency and accountability of all teams in order to reinforce the value of the company's overarching culture. Finally, the last and most important effort will be to ensure a strong workplace culture that goes far beyond the perks the company offers and that will take the form of hiring values-compatible people, or 'hiring for fit'. 

To allow all potential candidates to compete at the same level 

Strategy: 

Apart from being a potential source of motivation for employees, expanding the pool of potential leaders is now going to be a priority for E-Connect. Therefore, the strategy here will be to ensure that exiting leaders train many people as possible in their team so that when the time for transition comes, it will remain the work of the vetting team to select qualifying candidate to either replace or shadow the exiting leader in the key role position. 

To develop a leadership curriculum for the company based on the experiences of exiting employees

Strategy: 

Following on the footsteps of Steve Jobs of Apple in the founding of Apple University that teaches a curriculum based on the experiences of Jobs, the HR function at E-Connect will embark on the development based on all-time best practices by its key employees, both existing and former. The purpose will be to ensure that employees can think and make decisions as well as adopt various crisis plans for a myriad of hypothetical and real-life scenarios. 

Knowledge Transfer Plan 

There is no doubt that E-Connect would have joined the list of companies that worry about the institutional knowledge and experiences of exiting employees as it expects most Baby Boomers to retire next year. Guaranteeing the need to worry is the fact that when employees exit, they carry with them 70% of company knowledge (Rhatigan, 2016). Such knowledge departure carries the potential of altering workflow and culture and E-Connect would justify its need to be worried as its Baby Boomer generation of employees exit in large numbers. However, that will be no more because capturing such knowledge and experiences is also part of the current HR planning. The HR function acknowledges that while it is easier to retain explicit knowledge within knowledge management databases, it is challenging to capture tacit knowledge (Cronk, 2011; Dalkir & Liebowitz, 2011). The knowledge transfer plan is hereby adopted with the following mission, vision, goals, and strategies: 

Mission: To capture tacit knowledge embodied in people and explicit knowledge embedded in processes, organizational culture, and routines for the benefit of the organization. 

Vision: To be an organization that applies the best-practice approach to knowledge management, ensuring that tacit and explicit knowledge is treated as a spectrum rather than definitive points. 

GOALS AND STRATEGIES 

The only goal here is "To capture tacit knowledge among exiting employees and recycle it within the company for optimal performance". To achieve the goal, the HR department is going to develop a knowledge transfer strategy in three simple steps. The first step will be to establish what is indispensable for the company, given the specific knowledge that is at risk, by surveying its best employees with the most tenure on what skills need to be preserved. The second step will involve establishing knowledge transfer best practices, including mentoring, exit interviews, storytelling sessions, and practice communities to engage remaining employees and the ones exiting and even help to socialize new ones. The third step in this strategy will be to create a knowledge database and here technology will invaluable enabler to capture, share and reuse the knowledge captured. Additionally, a simple system will work for everyone in the company. 

Hiring New Recruits 

Finally, given that employees will be exiting at a time when the company will be having more responsibilities and increased workload, hiring new recruits will not be trivial. It will be a necessity. The mission will be "To attract and retain highly versatile and young talented workforce" with the long-term vision "To be the best employee for the young generation". The mission and vision are not only guided by the company's mission and vision but equally by the belief in young people shown by the current CEO of E-Connect and the fact that a population of the millennial generation is increasingly taking over workplaces. The goals of the recruitment and selection plan are: 

To attract top talent in the industry 

Strategy: 

E-Connect will enter a long-term agreement with institutions of higher learning to offer internships to their students, some of who will be absorbed upon their graduation. During the internship program, the company through its HR department will take the opportunity to introduce the interns to the culture, outline clear expectations and inquire about interns' expectations. 

To retain top talent in the industry 

Strategy: 

The company will develop competitive compensation and benefits package as well as offer additional perks that will include health insurance and on-the-job training and career development opportunities for both interns and employees. 

Conclusion 

In summarizing the discussion of the HR plan to implement the company's directive to mitigate the potential impact of employees exit, it is apparent that a plan that incorporates succession planning, knowledge transfer, and acquisition of new hires will work effectively. Succession planning will help E-Connect to hire from within while filling or shadowing key roles that will have been left vacant by exiting the workforce. On the other hand, knowledge transfer initiatives will help to capture tacit knowledge embodied in the Baby Boomers and which will be of strategic advantage to the company. Finally, getting new hires will be an imperative and drawing these from a pool of fresh graduates will add an impetus to the digital firm that is looking for young and innovative people. 

References 

Cohn, C. (2014). How to Create and Maintain a Workplace Culture That Will Make Your Company Thrive. Forbes.com. Retrieved 20 Jun 2018, from https://www.forbes.com/sites/chuckcohn/2014/10/17/how-to-create-and-maintain-a-workplace-culture-that-will-make-your-company-thrive/ 

Cronk, M. (2011). Social Capital, Knowledge Sharing, and Intellectual Capital in the Web 2.0 Enabled World, In David Gurteen. (ed. 2012). Leading Issues in Social Knowledge Management (pp. 74 – 87). Academic Publishing International Limited. 

Dalkir, K., & Liebowitz, J. (2011). Knowledge management in theory and practice . Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press. 

Lieberman, J. M., & Wilkins, E. A. (2006). The Professional Development Pathways Model: From Policy to Practice. KAPPA DELTA RECORD PI, 124-128. 

Rhatigan, C. (2016). 3 STRATEGIES TO RETAIN INSTITUTIONAL KNOWLEDGE AFTER AN EMPLOYEE QUITS. TinyPulse.com. Retrieved 20 Jun 2018, from https://www.tinypulse.com/blog/keep-institutional-knowledge