Reinventing HR at the School of Philadelphia

Individual Case Analysis Case: Situation analysis: • The school district of Philadelphia has got over 2,500 students with $1.9 billion budget, and 217,405 students in 274 students. • The school has performed low academic achievement compared to the country on average basis plus having $ 200 million deficit in operating budget. • The school district of Philadelphia has recently terminated four senior managers in HR Department. • A campaign called “Human Capital Management” has been recently conducted to bring HR department performance back on track. • The new HR Director, who initiated the campaign with CEO support and government officials, brought a lot of positive changes in HR department. Decision moment: • HR Departments needs to operate more strategically and be line-managed by CEO. HR also needs to decide whether to undertake another campaign from within HR to get the best teachers in front of the most academically at-risk students. Issues: • The site-based selection process is under way and its success is still unclear • The HR department is still seen as arrogant and unhelpful entity from some stakeholder’s perspective within district despite many improvements by New HR director. • The HR department is not reporting to the CEO but to COO and has been incognizant of the program needs to plan properly HR services, though there are some improvements recently. • HR was totally broken-down and is still in recovering mode. • The different divisions within HR used to work in silos and isolation, though it has been recently restructured with new divisional HR managers. • The turnover rate among the teacher is very high and finding pool of competent candidates remains as a big challenge. • Late decision-making of district’s leadership in relation to retirement incentive program, negatively impact HR’s projected recruitment plan due to lack of communication. • HR systems isn’t technologically equipped to meet the current demand of the operation e.g. employee data system. Alternative courses of action &analysis: • To continue implementing the campaign’s “Human Capital Management” recommendations. This will help fixing-up. • To provide learning and development activities for the HR team to build their capacity and equip the department with technological upgrades to manage administrative process. This will only help the team operationally with no major impact strategically. • To separate the line-management of HR from COO to CEO and make it engaged in more strategic activities by undertaking the second campaign focused on improved services (recruiting competent teachers). This will make HR be seen important and will be embedded in strategic decision-making process to provide effective services.

Grounded recommendation(s): • Given the context in the case, the last alternative is recommended as the best one, since it is changing HR role from operational to strategic one. This will also enable them to provide significant services to the customers. Meanwhile, focusing on the other two alternatives will further build-up HR department and should be paid due consideration.