Answer:
Environmental scanning.
Explanation:
When an HRM professional utilizes SWOT analysis, and strategic thinking about external and internal competitive issues impacting the company, including political, economic, market, social, geographic, and technological trends, this is called environmental scanning.
Environmental scanning can be defined as a management strategy that focuses on systematically acquiring informations about occasions, trends, events or patterns through surveys and analysis of these information in an organisation's external and internal environment.
This simply means that, if an organization wants to succeed and remain competitive in the industry, it is necessary and utterly important that it regularly scans its environment so that it can assess its growth or developments and understand critical factors which contributed to its success.
Hence, the environmental scanning is classified into two (2) main categories and these are;
1. Internal environmental scanning: it is made up of essential elements or components that lie within an organization such as objectives, culture, value systems, mission, vision, goals, organizational structure, employees etc.
2. External environmental scanning: it is made up of essential elements or components that outside of an organization such as customers, market, rivals, politics, economic policies, demography etc.
Generally, the internal environmental scanning offers an organization Strength and Weakness while the external environmental scanning provides information about Opportunities and Threats. These four influencing environmental factors are known as the SWOT analysis (strength, weakness, opportunity and threats).
With the aforementioned four environmental factors, an organization is able to make strategic business decisions by identifying available opportunities and threats affecting the business, as well as used is strengths and improve on its weaknesses.
