Many people who work in the HR profession focus their efforts on improving the typical HR activities that are performed in a firm, including staffing, training and development, compensation, and performance appraisal. However, they sometimes overlook the important strategic objectives of their employers. This is why managers in other areas of a company often fail to see the importance of HR staff. There doesnt seem to be any real connection between what the HR function does and what the firm is trying to accomplish strategically. Therefore, HR professionals need to get involved with performance consulting in companies, which requires them to be more proactive in their approach to managing HR activities.

This is what Craig Mundy focused on when he was given the opportunity to take over the HR area in Ingersoll Rands Climate Solutions, a large and valuable business unit within the company that was created by merging Trane and Thermo King under one operational umbrella. The unit employs 25,000 individuals and has locations in over 60 nations. Performance consulting was particularly important to Climate Solutions because the global economic downturn occurred right after the unit was created, which means that costs had to be managed while the organization tried to make global gains. Keys were controlling costs and improving productivity.

The HR group worked with managers to create positive talent plans to help the unit reach its strategic goals. In particular, the following issues were addressed by HR:

• The key operations gaps that stopped individuals from accomplishing their objectives were highlighted.
• A variety of approaches to effectively reduce gaps were identified.
• Solutions tied to performance management were created and utilized.

After addressing performance issues, Craig began developing a talent solutions framework that enabled leaders to identify the causes of performance problems in the organization and to develop fixes. The framework is based on workforce planning, which involves finding out the firms talent requirements. Once these needs are known, leaders can determine how and when employees will be hired. Developing individuals once they are hired is the next issue that is addressed in the framework, followed by how to improve employee engagement and retention. Finally, performance needs to be monitored so that successes can be documented. Using this talent solutions framework at Ingersoll Rand enabled the HR group to play a more strategic role in the company.

Instructions: Using information from the lectures and from the textbook, answer the following questions.

Clearly number your responses, provide detailed answers and cite your sources of information.

Compare Craigs approach of focusing on performance gaps first to strategic analysis process described in the text in Section 2.2 Writing the HR Plan. Why doesnt the planning process described in the text fit this companys needs at this point in time?

The lecture on the evolving role of HR presented Ulrichs model of possible HR roles. Explain which of these roles Craig adopted in this case.

What suggestions would you make to his talent solutions framework approach based on the article on-line-of-sight? Be specific in using the authors suggestions.