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Review
It is only in the last 10-20 years that the real value of strategic human resource management has been understood, and started to influence decision-making around the top tables of major firms. Similarly, many other areas of business have now come under more scrutiny to see if they too would benefit from a more pro-active, dynamic approach. In particular, firms are becoming much more adept and planning ahead for change and including more strategic aims to a much wider range of growth initiatives.
In particular, the influence of new ways of working has influenced the promotion of the more strategic aspects of such business activity. For example, the adoption of Agile processes in digital firms in the past decade or so has given priority to the working environment and how it should enable a certain working ethos. This environment, it is argued, will persuade more interaction, cross-functional activity and a happier, more productive workforce. As such, every aspect of the make-up of the kind of office environment that promotes this can be analyzed to produce an optimal workspace for employees.
Integration
The adoption of a more strategic approach to all aspects of business is a hot topic among current business and management researchers, and understanding the impact of such an approach is increasing at a rate of knots. Contributing to this area is an article written by Hou et al . (2016) entitled "Tight budget constraints and the absence of strategic planning - an exploratory analysis of FM service outsourcing". The main focus of the paper is the assessment of how facilities management (FM) is being outsourced, and to what extent is this strategic in nature.
The key element to this is integration. Whereas businesses have always outsourced corporate services to a degree...