Harley-Davidson Motor Company: Strategic HR Function
Sometimes business success poses its own set of challenges. That was the experience of Harley-Davidson, the manufacturer of high-end motorcycles. Having recently celebrated its 100th anniversary as a company, Harley has enjoyed well-earned success in the marketplace. The company is known for the quality of its product and the loyalty of its customer base: Harley enjoys a 98 percent customer retention rate. The workforce, too, is extremely loyal. A sense of intense pride pervades the company. People want to work there, and the workforce has grown primarily from the inside, with existing employees bringing in friends and family to enjoy the good fortune of working for Harley-Davidson.
So what does a satisfied workforce do when the company must continue further along its journey to high performance and meet new challenges: competition from lower-priced competitors, and expansion into overseas markets? With so much going right for the company, why “mess with success”?
Clearly the company was facing a number of HR challenges in implementing more aggressive strategies. Employee satisfaction is great, as long as the workforce is also engaged and not complacent. One looming issue for Harold Scott, the vice president of HR for the company: HR has not historically been a major player at the company strategic table. One thing Scott knew for sure: if Harley-Davidson was to implement its new strategies, it had to bring its workforce along in the right way. It was imperative for the HR function to get right a number of basic issues with processes and technologies, to free up its HR executives to play a more vital role in company strategy.
The goal was to introduce a more metric driven viewpoint of human resources and to think about people programs in business terms. HR has always struggled to bring a tangible business case to the table. The business does not undergo a major initiative without some key underlying metrics critical to success; why should human resources be any different?
- Identify the problem in the case.
- What are the strategies that you would like to suggest to turn the function of HR into a Strategic HR?