Recruit and retain employees by building a people-centric HR strategy.
Your organization needs to attract the best talent in order to grow, but your current HR tools and practices might be hindering this growth. Strategic HR management looks beyond transactional HR basics with an eye to driving increased profits and growing your business.
It will help you and your fellow HR managers craft strategies that will help your business attract and retain the best talent. But how do you put these together, and what are the best strategies to use for your business?
What are HR management strategies?
A human resource strategy sets guidelines and expectations for how employees across your organization will be treated. Strategic HR allows companies to synthesize their human resources with wider organization goals and objectives. A strong HR software suite can be part of that strategy, but it isn't enough on its own.
Strategic human resource management stresses the importance of a people-centric approach. In an old-fashioned HR system, your HR reps are focused entirely on transactional duties. They post job openings, complete interviews, handle onboarding people, monitor workplace safety, and more. With strategic HR, you focus on the big picture instead. This approach helps to synthesize organizational goals with employees' needs to foster company success.
Strategic HR management leverages data that you've gathered about employees in order to identify where and how you need to develop people. It offers an array of benefits including:
A better work culture
Lower turnover rates
Increased customer and employee satisfaction
A boost in overall productivity
More efficient use of resources
More accurate employee performance tracking
Despite the benefits of holistic planning processes, only 47% of CEOs say that their organizations involve HR in larger planning discussions.[1] Integrating strategic human resource management during planning is essential—just remember that strategic planning should be ongoing and adaptable.
Types of HR management strategies
Strategic human resource management doesn't use a static set of rules. Instead, it can constantly be adapted to the needs and challenges of your organization. These strategies can be both overarching and specific. Overarching strategies address employee management on the whole, while specific strategies address different needs in areas such as recruitment, compensation, and employee development.
Some of the most effective HR strategies are:
Leveraging technology to automate transactional duties such as posting jobs and scheduling interviews.
Proactively planning for challenges instead of reacting to them in crisis mode.
Crafting a people-centric culture where employees feel valued and perform their best.
How to develop an HR management strategy
Before you can develop an HR strategy, you'll need to conduct a SWOT analysis that considers your organization's strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats.
Strengths | Where do you excel in general and in human resources specifically? |
Weaknesses | In what areas does your organization fall short? What recruiting or retention problems do you face? |
Opportunities | Where does your organization have room to develop, grow, or leverage existing strengths? |
Threats | What are the primary challenges facing your organization? What people-specific challenges affect profitability? |
Define desired business outcomes
Once you've conducted a SWOT analysis, define what business outcomes your organization would like to achieve through strategic HR planning. These are the goals that you'll focus on as you map out ways for HR to meet them.
Create strategies to meet your HR goals
After you've identified goals for HR operations, you'll need to create strategies to help you meet them. For example, imagine that employee exit surveys show that most employees are quitting because they're frustrated by working with untrained managers. Your company might launch a training program to increase manager effectiveness in the hopes that it will cut down on turnover. Or, if you want to increase the caliber of talent your company attracts, you might need to consider revising compensation structures to meet that goal.
Take stock of your current HR capacity
Determine how many employees are needed to meet your current goals, and forecast how much those needs are expected to grow in the future. Think about the job roles, education, qualifications, and compensation concerns that are likely to arise. Consider the following:
The issues your organization currently faces with recruitment
How well-equipped employees are for their jobs
Whether employees have the tools and resources needed to drive company success
As you map out an HR strategy, focus on addressing the weaknesses and leveraging the opportunities you identified during your SWOT analysis. Identify company-wide or department-specific HR programs and policies that will support business development and prioritize them during planning.
How do you implement an HR management strategy?
Implementing your human resource management strategy requires clear communication about new expectations, policies, and programs. Remember that introducing these changes is just the first step in solidifying a strategic HR approach. You'll need to monitor outcomes on a monthly, quarterly, and yearly basis to determine how well strategies are meeting needs.
Many organizations create a steering committee that's responsible for reviewing outcomes and determining areas where strategy needs to be adjusted. Remember that strategic HR planning is about continuous, forward-thinking adaptation. When organizational priorities and conditions change, your HR strategy will need to change too.
Learn more about strategic HR management
Are you ready to learn more about strategic HR and associated initiatives? Check out these human resources blogs and articles: