What is HR strategy? The four steps to success
The future is unpredictable. But with a strong and clear HR strategy in place for your business, you can be prepared to face any challenge that comes tomorrow.
The world has changed drastically over the last few decades. Long-standing practices obsoleted by rapid technological advances transforming every industry on the planet—including HR strategy!
What is HR strategy?
HR strategy is about aligning the organisation's people, processes, and operating philosophy to achieve its goals. It provides businesses with a clear direction for all the human resources areas and helps support the company’s overall business plan.
HR strategy is seen as the long-term plan that involves the entire process of managing the workforce and developing programs. It spans from recruitment to onboarding, employee relations, performance management, and more.
How to create a successful HR strategy
Successful HR strategies aren’t set in stone, but there is a right way to go about setting them up.
1. Align to business needs
HR strategies help organisations connect with their employees. To nurture this connection, it’s important to tether your company’s goals and objectives, as well as your individual employee needs together by using HR such as talent management software or payroll services.
When developing an HR strategy, make sure to look first into your business needs (i.e., managing personnel databases, landing top talents, compliance with laws, etc.). Then, map out plans and execute approaches that align with those goals.
2. Setting goals or objectives
When developing your HR strategy, you should always ask "What does success look like?". It's easier to build a plan around an end goal instead of coming up with one and hoping for the best.
One way to measure success is by establishing KPIs and tracking progress toward specific goals (quantitative or qualitative).
These metrics, like KPIs and analytics, will allow you to measure how well-qualified employees are for positions based on their skill sets. As well as what type of company culture they work in order to create more successful teams.
3. Drive engagement through communication
The support of key stakeholders is necessary for any HR strategy to succeed. Without their blessing and active participation, even the best plans will face resistance from day one.
You may not have the time to give every employee in your organisation a full-on strategic pitch, but you can get all the support you need to help carry it forward.
These are potential allies as mentioned above, for change that should be engaged with more frequently even if they're not directly responsible or impacted by HR's work. The key here is finding people willing accomplices rather than simply recipients; this will ensure success through their efforts on behalf of the shared goals.
4. Measure results
You’ve done all the hard work! Now, what you need to do is ensure monthly and/or quarterly reporting on key data and analytics is part of your broader strategic plan. The data is there for you to explore and use as a tool in your decision-making process.
It’s also important that you take time out of your day, even just once or twice per month if possible because this will make sure everyone knows how valuable measuring results really can be.
Both internal and external teams might need insights into what motivates certain behaviours among employees. Making these presentations regular and disciplinary can be a culture that goes a long way toward strengthening alignment around HR strategies.
Conclusion
The pandemic has thrown our HR strategy into chaos, but there are ways to get back on track. With these four steps, you can create a new level of strategic human resources management that will strengthen your culture and make employees happy.
Don't forget to check out Prosoft HRMS. With this HR software solution, you can now centralise all of your human resource activities in one place.
