Strategic Human Resources Practices

Description

The development and execution of a human resources strategy that is aligned with organizational goals and matched to an organization's competencies delivers tangible outcomes for an organization's people, customers, and shareholders. Such a strategy is based on transforming HR from a "business partner" to a "business leader" which requires in-depth knowledge of advanced and emerging HR topics. As a leader, HR plays a significant role, not only in human-capital development, but in how human capital can contribute to the execution of organizational and business strategies. This certificate program from Cornell University's ILR School develops the leadership competencies required make this transformation.

The courses in this series focus on the drivers for transforming HR into a world-class function: the HR leader's influence on strategy and organizational leaders, alignment of HR strategy, using diversity and inclusion to achieve bottom-line results, developing a talent-management culture, strategies for employee engagement, and using metrics to measure impact on business outcomes. Each course explores a topic in depth, with particular emphasis on the role of the HR leader, industry best practices, and short projects that emphasize the application to your particular organization.

Who Should Enroll in This Certificate?

This certificate series is designed for manager- and director-level HR professionals who are charged with improving HR's ability to contribute to organizational strategy and success. It is also appropriate for HR professionals seeking the advanced HR skills required for advancement to management and leadership positions.

Enrollment

To register, contact an Enrollment Counselor at info@ecornell.com or 1-866-326-7635 (+1-607-330-3200 from outside the United States).

Certificate programs are eligible for eCornell Payment Plans. Discounts are available for military personnel, veterans, and Cornell University Alumni. eCornell programs are not eligible for financial aid or federal Pell Grants. Contact an enrollment counselor for more information.

Courses in this Certificate

• Human Resources Leadership

  • Effective HR leaders look beyond managing the HR function. They don't stop at building the talent pool of the organization; they operate at the most senior levels and play a strategic role in the organization. They influence the strategic planning process to ensure alignment with the goals and values of the organization, while managing the process to ensure superior outcomes.

    This course is based on the research and industry expertise of Patrick M. Wright, Ph.D., Professor and Director of the Center for Advanced Human Resources Studies (CAHRS) at Cornell University. It introduces Dr. Wright's SELF Model of Human Resources Leadership that defines the leadership and influencing competencies needed to balance the tradeoffs present in the formation of organizational strategy. The SELF Model focuses on HR's role in guiding strategy development to ensure that it will result in the expected Strategic, Ethical, Legal, and Financial outcomes for an organization. This course also introduces the Human Frailties framework, a tool for managing the interpersonal dynamics at the most senior levels of the organization in order to produce the most positive results.

    Course Format

    All eCornell courses are delivered online and are self-paced. An eCornell instructor leads the online discussions, grades any course projects, and is available to answer specific questions about the course content.

    This course contains the following modules:

    • How HR Leads
    • HR Then and Now
    • Strategy and the HR Professional
    • Influencing Strategy Formulation
    • Decision-making Perspectives
    • The SELF Model
    • Managing Strategy Formation
    • The Human Frailties Framework
    • The HR Director's Roles

    
    
    Benefits to the Learner
    Participants who complete this course will be able to:

    • Describe three major roles you can play as an HR leader
    • Effectively influence business strategy as an HR leader
    • Discuss factors that may derail leaders and strategy
    • Implement guardrails to keep derailment from happening
    
    
• Aligning HR Strategy with Organizational Strategy

  • A thorough understanding of your organization's value creation model and ability to develop competencies through processes, technology, and people are essential to ensuring that the HR organization is aligned vertically and horizontally to produce superior results. With this understanding, HR will be able to articulate how it can improve processes, people and customer outcomes, and financial results.

    This course, based on the research and expertise of Christoper Collins, Ph.D., Associate Professor and Director of Executive Education for Cornell University's School of Industrial and Labor Relations, develops the skills needed to assess how organizations create value and to align the HR function to execute the organization's strategy. Participants analyze the Balanced Scorecard approach as a means of vertically aligning the HR system with organizational objectives. They learn how to create a vertical-alignment strategy and use it to improve HR decision-making, people outcomes, processes, customer outcomes, and financial results. And they learn the skills required to plan and assess horizontal alignment of HR systems and practices. Finally, the course discusses best practices related to workforce partitioning, performance variability, value identification, and employee impact.

    Course Format

    All eCornell courses are delivered online and are self-paced. An eCornell instructor leads the online discussions, grades any course projects, and is available to answer specific questions about the course content.

    This course comprises the following modules:

    • Value Creation
    • Creating Value
    • Competency
    • Vertical Alignment of HR
    • The Balanced Scorecard
    • Establishing a Need for HR
    • Horizontal Alignment of HR
    • What is Horizontal Alignment?
    • Assessing Horizontal Alignment

    
    
    Benefits to the Learner
    Participants who complete this course will be able to:

    • Discuss how an organization delivers value through coordinating people, processes, and technologies
    • Develop a plan to structure an organization's people, processes, and technologies to create maximum value for stakeholders
    • Use human resources alignment to maximize employee performance
    • Apply the balanced scorecard to improve HR decision making
    
    
• Diversity and Inclusion for Bottom-line Performance

  • The management of diversity and inclusion has evolved from handling day-to-day compliance issues to leveraging diversity for competitive advantage. Organizations that no longer see diversity as a legal or moral requirement, but as a competitive advantage, have an opportunity to improve performance at the financial, employee, customer, and community levels.

    Diversity and inclusion practices must be embedded in an organizational culture to make a positive impact on performance. This course summarizes the evolution of diversity and inclusion management; outlines key management practices for improving performance, contextualizes diversity in terms of current challenges, and provides direct linkages between diversity and the bottom line at the organizational and functional levels.

    Dr. Roberson's model of strategic approaches to diversity and inclusion provides a comprehensive toolkit for strategic diversity management, implementing next generation high-involvement practices, and ensuring stakeholder alignment with strategic objectives. The linkage between bottom-line performance and diversity is explored through the varying lenses of legal outcomes, customer and employee outcomes, and business metric improvements. In addition to measuring diversity's impact, and being able to create a diversity dashboard, learners discuss the future of diversity and inclusion and the complex relationships between diversity and organizational reputation, business practices, strategic capabilities, and financial performance.

    Course Format

    All eCornell courses are delivered online and are self-paced. An eCornell instructor leads the online discussions, grades any course projects, and is available to answer specific questions about the course content.

    This course contains the following modules:

    • Defining Diversity and Inclusion
    • Evolution of Diversity Management
    • A Business Case for Diversity
    • Diversity and Inclusion Practices I
    • A Basis for Diversity
    • Diversity Building Blocks
    • Devising Diversity Strategy
    • Stakeholder Management
    • Diversity and Inclusion Practices II
    • Diversity in Context
    • Diversity in Work Groups
    • Diversity and the Bottom Line
    • Diversity Framework and Ethics
    • Effectively Impacting the Bottom Line

    
    
    Benefits to the Learner
    Participants who complete this course will be able to:

    • Summarize the history of diversity and inclusion practices
    • Cite examples of successful diversity and inclusion practices
    • Explain how diversity can affect an organization's bottom line
    • Outline best practices for diversity and inclusion, and recommend how to implement those practices throughout an organization
    
    
• Building a Talent Management Culture

  • As the existing "war for talent" intensifies and becomes increasingly global, organizations must develop strong talent-management practices that are tightly aligned with business strategy. Successful organizations build talent management cultures to take advantage of their human capital. They focus on attracting top talent, identifying and developing future leaders, and retaining the best prospects in the high-potential talent pool.

    This course focuses on developing a strategic approach to managing core talent. Such an approach begins with the development of an employment brand in order to attract the best talent to the organization, promote the organization as a preferred employer, and produce superior recruiting outcomes. Organizations must then identify and implement an integrated marketing and communication strategy to build brand awareness. The complexity of managing employee retention and engagement includes understanding the root causes of talent-retention problems. The course identifies practices and solutions for increasing the likelihood of top talent remaining with the organization and becoming its future leaders.

    Course Format

    All eCornell courses are delivered online and are self-paced. An eCornell instructor leads the online discussions, grades any course projects, and is available to answer specific questions about the course content.

    This course comprises the following modules:

    • Attracting Talent to the Organization
    • The role of the employment brand
    • Creating the employment brand
    • Identifying an advertising/marketing communication strategy
    • Retaining Top Talent
    • Identifying drivers of turnover and retention
    • Increasing retention by creating employee embeddedness

    
    
    Benefits to the Learner
    Participants who complete this course will be able to:

    • Develop a model for talent management that attracts and retains talent
    • Revise your employment brand when internal and external changes to the organization diminish its effectiveness
    • Improve your organization’s retention and reduce turnover
    
    
• Measuring HR's Impact

  • HR leaders have the ability to drive business performance by defining, designing, developing, and delivering competitive advantage through people. A key component of their ability to do so is a solid understanding of the organization's business drivers and a demonstrable competence in matching human capital to strategic initiatives. Metrics enable HR to demonstrate its competence in terms of its business literacy and adopt a data-driven approach to management and leadership.

    This course focuses on identifying and developing key measures of HR's impact on business outcomes. It distinguishes between business metrics and HR metrics and relates them in terms of how to measure and communicate HR's value. Metrics must support the organization's business model. This course provides models for matching metrics to organizational outcomes and developing business-based metrics including the use of the balanced scorecard tied to financial, customer, process, and people outcomes. This course also provides frameworks for categorizing and analyzing metrics according the business value they measure, analyzing HR metrics, and building a model to link metrics to organizational goals and priorities.

    Course Format

    All eCornell courses are delivered online and are self-paced. An eCornell instructor leads the online discussions, grades any course projects, and is available to answer specific questions about the course content.

    This course contains the following modules:

    • Metrics for HR Leaders
    • Meeting Challenges and Making Decisions
    • Metrics That Support the Business Model
    • Metrics for Business Literacy
    • Developing a Strategy Map
    • Using the Balanced Scorecard
    • Metrics for Business Value
    • Categorizing Metrics for Value
    • Building Your Metrics Model
    
    
    Benefits to the Learner
    Participants who complete this course will be able to:

    • Use metrics to make better HR decisions
    • Account for the limitations of metrics for analyzing and managing the HR function
    • Use the balanced scorecard to measure financial, customer, process, and people outcomes
    • Avoid the potential misuses of metrics
    • Categorize and evaluate metrics to make better use of them
    
    
• Employee Engagement

  • Employee engagement can be broadly defined as employees consistently acting in the best interests of the organization. Linked to critical outcomes including absenteeism, turnover, customer satisfaction, operational performance, and financial performance, employee engagement is a vital driver of an organization’s bottom-line performance.

    This course focuses not only on why employee engagement is important and valuable, but also on how to foster and measure employee engagement and link it to key organizational metrics and outcomes. It examines the business case to pursue employee engagement as a strategic initiative and evolve beyond the transactional approach of traditional employee relations to a strategic approach focusing on relationship-oriented and emotional measurements of employee commitment. It also develops the competencies necessary to build employee engagement in your organization, the risks involved, and the implications for the HR professional in adopting this approach. This course is based on the research of Cornell ILR School Professors Patrick M. Wright, Director of the Center for Advanced Human Resource Studies, and Christopher J. Collins, Director of Executive Education.

    Course Format

    All eCornell courses are delivered online and are self-paced. An eCornell instructor leads the online discussions, grades any course projects, and is available to answer specific questions about the course content.

    This course contains the following modules:

    • The Value of Engagement
    • The Meaning of Engagement
    • Measures of Engagement
    • Engagement and the Bottom Line
    • Creating Engagement
    • How to Build Engagement
    • The Risks Involved
    • Implications for HR

    
    
    Benefits to the Learner
    Participants who complete this course will be able to:

    • Define and measure the value of employee engagement
    • Link employee engagement to organizational success
    • Build a plan to create employee engagement at your organization
    • Manage the risks associated with executing an employee engagement strategy
    
    

Accreditation / CEUs

HRCI Recertification

The courses in this certificate series have each been approved for six (6) recertification credit hours toward PHR, SPHR, and GPHR recertification through the Human Resource Certification Institute. Most courses have been approved for six (6) Strategic Management recertification credit hours toward SPHR and GPHR recertification. See individual course descriptions for more information. Please contact the Human Resource Certificate Institute (HRCI) for further information about certification or recertification.

Accreditation

Participants who successfully complete all six course in this certificate series receive a Strategic Human Resources Practices certificate from Cornell University's School of Industrial and Labor Relations.

Cornell's School of Industrial and Labor Relations (ILR) will give .6 Continuing Education Units (CEUs) to each student who successfully completes each course. Students can apply to the ILR School for the CEU units after they have successfully completed the courses.