HRMT20026 - Tesla's HR Strategy: Challenges and Implementation

This assignment analyzes Tesla's strategic human resource management, focusing on the integration of HR strategy into the broader corporate strategy. It explores how Tesla embeds its HR practices to align with its business objectives, examining recruitment, training, and performance appraisal within various departments. The essay also addresses contemporary HR challenges faced by Tesla, such as skill gaps and employee engagement, and discusses how these challenges necessitate adjustments to its HR strategy. The analysis highlights the importance of linking HR strategy to corporate goals, the implementation of HR practices at a departmental level, and the impact of current issues on Tesla's overall HR approach, drawing on academic research and industry insights to support its arguments.

Running Head: TESLA 0
Strategic Human Resource Management

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Introduction
It is true that human resource plays an essential role in the organization. It is required
to frame the HR strategy by taking into account the corporate strategy. The discussion begins
with importance of embedding the HR strategy into the corporate strategy. Furthermore,
Tesla HR strategy has been undertaken. Several organization in recent time is also facing HR
challenges that is explained by taking into account the Tesla.
Question 1: It is true that embedding of HR strategy into corporate strategy is a good idea, as
it will prove to be effective by linking both strategies. By knowing the overall objective of
the organization, it will become easy to hire or train the personnel accordingly. It also proves
to be the opportunity for shaping the corporate plans (Sparrow, Hird & Cooper, 2015).
Moreover, HR strategy plays the significant role in the most important parts of the process of
corporate planning. Most of the HR strategies also put emphasis on getting the best result
from the HR team that can be possible by knowing the corporate objective. It proves to be
good idea also because when any corporate objective changes in the organization it will
become easy to train the employees if HR strategy is linked with corporate objective (Cascio,
2015). It will also become easy by comparing the HR strategy with the overall corporate
strategy in order to ensure the matching of top priorities. The proper linking of both the
strategies will also ensure the required outcomes that tend to support the business goals. By
embedding the corporate strategy, it can also force the HR to describe what strategic
responses it will keep for meeting the needs of corporate strategy using development or
compensation (França, Broman, Robèrt, Basile & Trygg, 2017). However, it is essential to
keep the process of planning simple by avoiding too much details or projects. It is because,
this likely to lose the new entrants. It is also found that the best human resource strategies are
those that properly integrated with the entire corporate plans. This is the only reason many
organisations are successful by embedding the HR strategy into corporate strategy. On the
one side HR strategy, provide the framework for the tactical planning. The next level of the
planning process is the development of action plans that helps in converting the strategy into
operations by making use of strategic master plans. It is also true that the changing trends
affect the HR as well as corporate strategy. Therefore, both strategies are required to be
linked as change in trend will require bringing changes in HR as well as corporate strategy. In
this way, linking of both the strategies is really a good idea for every organization (Bolten,
2016).

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Question 2: It is true that Tesla effectively embedded its HR strategy into the broader
corporate strategy. It is founded that Tesla has around 13,000 employees across all the four
continents (Wright & Nishii, 2017). Its each HR strategy includes the innovative ideas,
professional knowledge, and human resource of company, inspiring management skills, and
commitment and loyalty of employees. All the HR strategy made in Tesla is made by giving
due consideration of the overall corporate objective. Tesla effectively incorporates the
engagement of its employees into the corporate strategy (Kompalla, Kopia & Tigu, 2016). It
is one of the reasons Tesla is named as one of the innovative company. As per Bednarski and
Efron, the key drives of Tesla leadership and innovation is the Tesla exceptional leaders,
people, purpose, as well as active engagement of every individual in the organization. By
taking account all of its corporate plans, it identifies and attract the talented and best
employees (Brewster, 2017). It has also done proper research in its HR strategy that stated
that engaged teams tends to bring higher productivity, profitability, customer engagement,
and less safety issues, turnover, and absenteeism. By incorporating its HR strategy into the
corporate strategy, it has shared its current success by measuring the employee engagement.
Before making the broader corporate objectives, it uses the top to down approach so that each
person gets included in the corporate plans. Moreover, it is also found that Tesla do not use
the one size fit communication strategy for announcing the Tesla 360 to the entire employees
(Bratton & Gold, 2017). In addition to this, Tesla at the time of recruiting or providing
training to the employees keeps in mind the changing corporate goals or objective. It has also
effectively planned for the HR business partners for ensuring the team conversation related to
data. However, it is found that managers themselves have enthusiasm for leading the follow
up action planning sessions (Dundon & Rafferty, 2018).
Question 3: In Tesla, each HR strategy is implemented for each of the department in
organization. For example- in a report, it has been stated that bonuses as well as promotion
both at Tesla is built around the 1 to 5 rating system. Person from any of the department can
be given the rating whether it is HR department or production, finance department. The main
areas that HR strategy covers are recruitment, selection, and training and performance
appraisal. Each department requires all such areas for bringing better results. In this way, any
organization can implement the HR strategy at any if the department whether I is finance,
sales or marketing. HR department is required in each of these departments as human

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resource plays a significant role in every department (Akakpo, Gyasi, Oduro & Akpabot,
2019). If any shortcoming of person has occurred, it is the HR department who plays the
significant role. Similarly, due to change in government policy or changing trend, HR
department has to provide the required training to employees of any department. In this way,
it is true that HR strategy is required to be implemented for every department in the
organization (Bruijl, 2017). For implementing the HR strategy, it is also significant for the
HR leader to examine the demographics of workforce in order to determine he gaps that exist
between the current skills and need for skills in upcoming time. By knowing the overall
vision of the organization, HR strategy can focus on each of the department through strategic
retention, recruitment, as well as training efforts. It is also essential to ensure the transferring
of knowledge between all the workers of department. It is also essential to ensure the minimal
impact as well as continuity on the effectiveness and productivity. In addition to this,
performance appraisal is also one such strategy that can be implemented within each
department. It is essential to appraisal the performance of every department in organization
because the entire department assist in the well being of the organization. For example- If any
organization appraises the performance of one department and ignores the other department,
then it leads to affect the performance of whole organization. Tesla also proves to be effective
for ensuring the HR strategy in each department of the organization.
Question 4: Tesla is recently facing several challenges in its organization. The major
challenge is related to the skill gap that most of the organization is facing in recent time. The
issue of increase in demand of skilled workers in current time is the serious challenge where
supply is not able to keep the similar pace (Esmaeilzadeh, Blem, Amant, Sankaralingam &
Burger, 2013). Due to this, companies are even willing to pay the premium price for the
skilled and capable persons. For such shortage of skills, Tesla has already started thinking
regarding how it will be going to fill the required jobs with the competent personnel (Wong,
2017). It is true that Tesla is not backward in hiring the skilled workers but still the talent
acquisition team should think about more than just the wages in order to identify, attract, as
well as engage the most effective candidate according to the recent economic and labour
conditions (Paauwe & Boon, 2018). In addition to this, many of the workers also made
complain regarding the gruelling pressure due to the aggressive production goals. Many
workers also made complain regarding the fainting spells, seizures, dizziness, chest pains,
abnormal breathing as per the incident report. Therefore, Tesla can address such issues by
ensuring regular medical check-ups for all of its workers. Besides this, most of the workers

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are also having long working hours, hard time, and hard jobs. However, its safety records
have improved but it remains to some extent. It can also ensure the strict policies for ensuring
the safety of its workers (Grant, 2016). In a report, it is also found that workers have to face
the culture of longer working hours sometimes even through injury and pain for fulfilling the
production goals of their CEO. For removing or addressing such type of HR issue, it should
take the open-end communication in order to know the viewpoints of its workers. Effective
communication will result in minimising such issues (Wong, 2017).
Conclusion
In the limelight of above discussion, it can be stated that Tesla despite of its brand
name and reputation, facing several issues. The corporate strategy of any organization
includes the long-term vision. The employees of the organization convert all those visions
into action. Therefore, it is essential to link the HR strategy of the organization with corporate
strategy.

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