MHRM 6701 Week 1 Strategy Statement Discussion Post Example

Week 1 Discussion: Which Statement Is the Strategy?

Three Sentences on a Linen Service's Website, and the Only One It Can Be Held To: Next-Morning Cart Return and the Overnight Crew It Quietly Commits the Plant To

The website of Allerton Linen Services, the composite family-owned hospital laundry in western New York that our course follows, carries three sentences that each sound like a direction. "Excellence in everything we do." "Our people are our greatest asset." And, lower on the page: "Clean carts on every hospital client's floors by 6 a.m. the next morning." Only the third can be held against the company, and I think it is the real strategy.

Why the First Two Rule Nothing Out

A statement of direction is useful only if it rules some choices out. Collis and Rukstad (2008) argue that a strategy statement should define an objective, a scope and an advantage clearly enough that employees can tell which opportunities to decline. "Excellence in everything we do" forbids nothing; no company aims at mediocrity. "Our people are our greatest asset" is a sentiment that any employer can claim, including one that staffs its plant almost entirely with temporary workers. Neither sentence would ever stop a manager from making a particular decision.

The third sentence is different. It names a customer, hospitals, a deliverable, clean carts on the floor, and a deadline, 6 a.m. the next morning. It could be broken on a specific night, and a hospital nurse manager would notice. That is what makes it a commitment.

What the Promise Quietly Commits the Plant To

A 6 a.m. return means soiled linen collected in the evening has to be sorted, washed, dried, folded and loaded overnight. The plant's busiest hours therefore fall overnight, and its delivery record rests on the night crew. At Allerton's Cheektowaga plant, about a third of that crew are agency temporary workers, and turnover among the direct hires runs at about 70 percent a year. Becker and Huselid (2006) tie the payoff from HR practices to how closely they match a firm's way of competing. If the firm competes on the overnight turnaround, then a stable, trained night crew is not a nice-to-have. It is the strategy's working part, and the website never mentions it.

There is evidence that crew stability matters for exactly this kind of promise. Hausknecht et al. (2009) found that units with higher voluntary turnover delivered lower service quality, and that the damage was worse where many newcomers were working at once. An overnight crew where a third of the people are temporary and most direct hires leave within a year is, by that measure, a crew built to miss deadlines. On the nights a cart arrives late, the hospital will not blame the night shift; it will blame Allerton, and it will remember the promise on the website.

Question for the Class

Has your organization ever published a promise to customers that, followed back far enough, became a staffing commitment nobody had budgeted for? I am curious whether anyone saw that promise change who was hired or how they were paid.

References

Becker, B. E., & Huselid, M. A. (2006). Strategic human resources management: Where do we go from here? Journal of Management, 32(6), 898-925. https://doi.org/10.1177/0149206306293668

Collis, D. J., & Rukstad, M. G. (2008). Can you say what your strategy is? Harvard Business Review, 86(4), 82-90.

Hausknecht, J. P., Trevor, C. O., & Howard, M. J. (2009). Unit-level voluntary turnover rates and customer service quality: Implications of group cohesiveness, newcomer concentration, and size. Journal of Applied Psychology, 94(4), 1068-1075. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0015898