Assessment Description Your written report for Assessment 2b is a 2,000 word document (+/- 10%). It includes the HR practices the operational HR activities needed to implement the HR strategy.? You will be providing an analysis that ranges from an assessment of your organisations external environment through to the specific HR practices that the organisation needs to implement the business and HR strategies. You are required to explain in clear and coherent sentences the arguments (or an updated, developed or revised version of the argument) you submitted in Assessment 2a, extended to include the HR (operational) practices needed to fully implement the business and HR strategy. Assessment Criteria Your report will be assessed on your ability to: analyse the external environment of the organisation develop a business strategy identify the strengths and weaknesses of an organisation develop an HR strategy explain and justify HR policies and practices explain relevant concepts covered in the course communicate effectively. Assessment Instructions What is HR policy and practice? It is the actual operational HR activity. It is what converts the plan the strategy `into reality. It is what the HR practitioners spending their day doing. It is the actual set of activities and processes that the business uses. In this assessment you need to specify what your chosen organisation needs to do to convert the HR strategy into actual activity. This will require you to draw on your previous studies, your experience, the content of this course, and your own reading. You need to develop a clear argument that links your proposed organisational response to its environment to its set of HR practices. Your first step is to undertake an evaluation of the context that surrounds the organisation (STEEPLED). By way of analogy: imagine yourself to be the captain of the Titanic. Will you be looking for icebergs or will you be having dinner with the passengers, telling them how unsinkable the ship is? This will help you to identify a set of opportunities and threats, some of which may inform the organisations business strategy. You need to make clear a business strategy that outlines how the organisation will achieve its goals, given the overall environment. Does the organisation have the HR ability, skills and practices to actually implement the HR part of the business strategy? The strengths and weakness analysis will examine whether the organisation has the HR attributes needed to implement the business strategy. The HR strategy sketches what the organisation needs to do to ensure that HR fully supports the business strategy. The HR practices spell out how the HR strategy will be implemented. You need to clarify the relationships between all of these stages. Usually students skim over the relationship between the STEEPLED analysis and the business strategy, as well as the relationship between the business strategy, the strengths and weakness analysis and the HR strategy. Make these relationships clear. You will also need to spend some time explaining how the HR policies and practices could be/should be set up to achieve the organisations business strategy. The strongest papers will include all of this. Most of the class will be nearing the end of their studies and will have been exposed to a wide range of ideas, constructs, theories, processes, technologies about how the world works and how HR in particular may work. Your paper could and should draw on this content, where appropriate. For example, based on your Assignment 2a papers, Assignment 2b papers could feasibly touch on workforce planning, recruitment and selection strategies, job and work process design; cultural change; organisational restructuring; turnover and retention management; recognition of diversity, use of performance management, training and development, remuneration, the introduction of some system of HR metrics, etc. Some issues will be more salient in 2021 than in previous years, such as: the growing concern of practitioners about the worsening mental health of sections of the work force (WHS); the difficulty of many employers to fill vacancies (ie clever recruitment and selection); the need for contingency planning if the relaxation of COVID prevention regulation leads to a sudden surge in infection across the community (WHS, business continuity planning/ workforce planning) if the Great Resignation occurs (retention management), etc… Write a report. Assessment Advice and Resources Use headings if you need to. Make it easy for the reader to read. Explain this. Not everything that is obvious to you is obvious to someone else. Use appendices if you need to report the STEEPLED, OT or SW analyses. If your paper has lots of tables and figures that make you go over the word limit you can move the tables and figures to the appendices. Just refer to these tables and figures in the paper, so the marker knows where to look. Examples Here are good but not perfect examples of Assessment 2b that were submitted in a previous year. Example 1 Example 2 Example 3Show more
