Clearly stating the Human Resources Department’s mission statement is an act of strategic importance, as it will allow the Chief HR Officer to translate your company’s organizational values into words, and thus structure his/her vision. This statement will indeed express the strategic orientation that will have to be impulsed to the HR Department, in order for them to achieve the company’s strategic goals in terms of Human Resources management.
The next step will consist in outlining the policies that will set the rules as to how these resources should be acquired, managed and developed. This set of policies will serve as a reference framework for all the procedures and methods that will have to be implemented to perform all Human Resources processes (guidelines). As a consequence, these policies will have to be supported by a Business Plan and followed up using a so-called “management cockpit”.
More often than not, the company has already written a mission statement for its HR Department. Yet, it often comes closer to a to-do list than to an actual mission statement, the aim of which would be to position the roles of the HR Department in a more global context. It should thus include human aspects and reflect the company’s organizational values.
Please note that this statement should also directly derive from the organizational mission statement and that it represents a potent tool of organizational communication, whether it is addressed to a public inside or outside of the company.
TOOLS
The HR Department’s mission statement is thus based on the following elements:
- The organizational mission statement
- The organizational values
- The end goal of the HR Department (i.e. its strategic orientations)
PRACTICE
The mission statement of the HR Department should thus depict the final purpose of its action within the organization. Moreover, it should be presented in a synthetic way, so that anyone reading it may be able to understand what it is actually about. The following schema is taken from the Management by Coaching (MPC™) approach. It illustrates the implications of any given sub-entity’s mission statement on its environment inside and outside the organization (illustration).
The mission statement of an HR Department should thus be built up around 3 strategic axes:
- A corporate axis with the positioning of the Human Resources in the company’s workflows
- An organizational axis that will answer the question of the “How?” by encompassing the professional dimension and the operational goals
- A human axis that will answer the question of the “With whom?” that implies the management of human aspects, as well as organizational values
Its formulation, just as that of any mission statement within your company, should follow the following principles and contain:
- An action verb: (e.g. ensure, guarantee, organize…) that should truly match the role of the Department.
- Indications on the HR Department’s role in the organization: these indications complete the action verb (e.g. ensure the completion of the goals set by the Board). They also state the HR Department’s areas of activity .
- Indications on the recipients of the HR Department’s services (i.e. its “customers”): here we specify the public that will actually receive the services delivered by the HR Department (e.g. the top management, the Heads of Departments, all the collaborators…).
- The HR Department’s quality standards: the way in which the quality of the delivered services will be assessed should be briefly described (e.g. according to set standards; according to predetermined assessment criteria; within the limits of the budget…).
- The modalities of service delivery: the way in which HR services are delivered (by anticipating future needs; by implementing a development plan, a Management by Objectives system, a Management Development program; in close collaboration with the management; etc.).
It is true that such a mission statement will be much longer than the ones generally used. It will, however, present the advantage of being more exhaustive. It will also be deeper-rooted in organizational life. As a general rule, a maximum of 3 sentences should be used (i.e. one sentence for each strategic axis).
SAMPLE
In order to illustrate what has just been said, here is an example of what the formulation of the HR Department’s mission statement could be like:
- Contribute to the company’s durability by developing an HR strategy that supports customer-orientation as well as the delivery of high-quality advisory and services, in strict compliance with legal, moral, social and economic standards.
- To do so, we develop, master and implement HR processes that will meet the company’s present needs; we also anticipate its future needs by managing future resources in advance, developing the workforce’s level of employability and creating a synergy with both the company’s Operational Units and the market by encouraging dialogue and the exchange of information and insights.
- Our employees enjoy working with us because they are informed, listened to, respected, trained, given responsibility to and assessed with fairness.
