HR strategy: The Irish Forestry Board (Coillte Teoranta)

“PricewaterhouseCoopers has helped us to understand how we can align our HR strategy with our business objectives”

Eamonn McGee
Director, Human Resources
The Irish Forestry Board

The issue

The Irish Forestry Board is a leading Irish company, which operates in forestry and related businesses from 32 locations throughout Ireland. Historically a public sector organisation, it became a private limited company in 1988. As with many privatised companies, improving overall organisational efficiency was a key strategic priority, made even more pressing due to increasing competition in
recent years. The Irish Forestry Board wanted to audit the effectiveness of their Human Resource service delivery to ensure that their 1,100 employees were able to efficiently deliver their strategic objectives.

The Irish Forestry Board had the following key objectives:

• to understand how their HR function could add more value to the business and support the business strategy
• to develop an HR strategy to provide a ‘road map’ on how to manage people effectively towards achieving their strategic goals
• to understand what organisational changes would be necessary to realise the new HR strategy.

Our approach

The Irish Forestry Board had previously been aware of the PricewaterhouseCoopers Global and Ireland Human Capital Survey and, as a result, asked Human Resource Services in Ireland to tender for this project. In winning this work, they told us they were impressed by our practical experience in the area of strategic HR management, combined with our approach and substantial HR benchmarking data.

We approached the project from a business perspective by establishing where the business wants to go in the future and how HR could help it to achieve its objectives. We held a visioning session with the senior management team to identify the key challenges the business would face over the next two years, and the people implications of these challenges.
We used interviews, focus groups and questionnaires to collect information from the HR team, line managers and other internal stakeholders to assess current people management practices and processes. We benchmarked this information against the data from our Global and Ireland Human Capital Survey, as well as selected comparator organisations. We drew up recommendations
on priority areas to be addressed over the next two years in their HR strategy, covering short, medium and long-term needs. We included recommendations to enhance the organisation’s capability to deliver the HR strategy, including HR structure, roles and competencies. All recommendations
were discussed and agreed with the senior management team at an interactive workshop.

The outcome

As a result of this project, The Irish Forestry Board now have a clear vision of their future HR strategy, which is aligned to the business strategy and supported by an HR service delivery model which enables them to deliver the HR and business strategies. The HR function has agreed on key performance metrics to measure their future contribution to the business.

The Irish Forestry Board told us that we greatly exceeded their expectations and they were especially pleased with the new HR service delivery model that we designed to support the implementation of their HR strategy. They really valued our expertise in the area of strategic HR management, backed up by our external research and objectivity. As a result, The Irish Forestry Board has asked us for ongoing assistance in the implementation of our recommendations, which we are currently in the process of doing.

For more information about our services, please visit our HR Strategy section.