HR Strategy

What is HR Strategy? It is the alignment of your tactical “people” related issues such as human capital, recruiting, retention, compensation, and benefits to your business objectives. The value of linking your business strategy with an HR strategy includes:

• Limit your risk
• Align business goals with individual employee efforts
• Identify gaps to assess how the organization needs to grow to meet those corporate objectives
• Minimize the amount of time it takes for you to address productivity-draining people issues
• Ensure continuity of practices across all departments
• Provide the appropriate tools for the employee’s full-life cycle (Job Descriptions, Employee Handbooks and Performance Management Guidelines are just a few examples)

While developing an HR strategy we consider the following components:

Communication:

We are referring to your Policies, Procedures and Practices; it is how your employees both receive and provide information that ultimately affects your culture, productivity and legal risk.

Goal Setting:

Increase employee motivation and direction by driving organizational goals down beyond the C-level to specific performance objectives for each position within your organization. One of the greatest keys to attracting and retaining talent is to ensure they know what’s expected of them and how their individual contributions impact the bigger picture.

Benefit & Compensation Strategy:

There is a significant strategic advantage to developing a three year plan to anticipate benefit and compensation costs. By considering your business objectives, HR can identify at what employee-size you may reach to qualify for different benefit plans and what the implications of those rates may be (think better benefits at a lower per employee cost). In planning for your payroll you’ll be able to distinguish which positions you may want to pay a premium for while concurrently identifying where you may be able to bring on a more junior employee.

Organizational Analysis & Growth Strategy (a.k.a. Workplace Planning):

Essentially what we’re referring to is having an accurate skills level assessment of your talent. What skills do your employees have that they are using to contribute towards the company objectives? It’s not surprising that you may have in-house skills that are not being utilized if there have been advancements to management or lateral moves given to retain talent. Strategic HR practices can assess and identify gaps in skills needed to achieve the big picture corporate objectives. This information can be utilized to prioritize the positions that you’ll need filled. An added value of this exercise is identification of development opportunities for your existing employees.