Crafting a Winning HR Strategy

What Is a Human Resource Strategy, and Why Do You Need One?

HR strategies align your company’s human capital (aka employees) with its mission, values, and goals. From competitive compensation and effective recruitment to employee retention, the goal of an HR strategy is to ensure that the company’s goals are realized with the right employee management.

With an HR strategic plan, a company might know its employee talent gaps and how to fill them. It might need to be recruiting the right talent at the right time or with the right resources. An HR strategy is the backbone of a business's employee and recruitment pool, creating necessary guidance for workplace safety, benefits, and legal compliance.

Think of it like the secret sauce that drives business success, fuels engagement and communication, and fosters a positive work culture.

How to Create an HR Strategy

Before developing a benefits package or employee training tools, you must create an HR strategy. HR strategies are often adjusted yearly depending on the company's and its employees' needs. But the foundation should stay the same: help the company meet its goals while supporting employees as they grow and develop their skills.

Here’s how to start creating your strategic HR plan.

Know the Company’s Mission and Values

The first step when creating a strategic human resources plan is to get to know the company's mission, values, and goals. Here are some questions that you and your HR team should be able to answer:

• What long-term objectives does the business want (and need) to achieve? What about its short-term goals?
• What are the company’s values, and how do employees fit into these values?
• Who are the company's competitors, and what is the competitive landscape like right now?
• What is the company’s growth plan, and is it currently meeting its growth targets?

Working with the company's executives and leadership team to get a complete picture of the business's objectives will help you craft HR strategies that align with and complement the company's goals.

Conduct a SWOT Analysis

So, based on the previous questions, how do you identify what's needed to achieve the business's goals and stand out in a competitive landscape to other companies and prospective employees? Again, a SWOT analysis is the key.

SWOT stands for Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats, and this type of analysis helps both business and HR teams get a good look at all four of these areas for the company.

Understand What’s Needed to Achieve the Goals of the Company

Once you've completed the SWOT analysis, the next step in creating HR strategies is formulating a plan for mitigating weaknesses, leveraging opportunities, and avoiding threats. For example, if the SWOT analysis determined gaps in current employee talent, consider ways to fill those gaps. Or the SWOT analysis revealed that the company isn't effectively carrying out some of its necessary functions, so part of the HR strategy is to investigate ways to reduce time on tasks or implement new technologies.

Long story short, this is the step in which you and your team will align with business executives and department leads to determine how to achieve the company's goals.

Determine Which Tools and Services You’ll Need

This step is how you'll implement the ideas brainstormed in the previous step. First, you'll research which HR systems and services you'll need to implement the strategy. These could include strategic HR management platforms, recruitment services, employee portals, employee recognition programs, benefits, etc.

Don’t Forget Metrics

First, you need to determine how you're measuring success! Will you hire new employees to lead a project to help set the company apart from competitors? If so, perhaps a good measure of success will be taking that project to market or, on a smaller scale, reaching a developmental milestone in 6 months.

Set specific metrics that should be reached for each strategic HR component. That way, you'll know if the strategy is working or needs to be tweaked.

HR Strategy Examples and How To Know Which One is Right for Your Company

Given how HR is woven into the fabric of every company, it's no surprise that there are a lot of HR strategies to reach any given goal. Here, we've provided an overview of common company goals, opportunities, threats, and so on, and ways HR teams can implement strategies for each.

High Employee Turnover

No business wants high employee turnover; that means that your employees are seeking out better jobs, and you’re losing out on talent. Assuming that your SWOT analysis gives you insights into why employees leave, use the data or responses to develop a plan to keep your workforce happy and fulfilled.

This could include providing more growth opportunities, competitive salaries, better benefits, work-from-home or gym stipends, and hybrid work — you get the idea. Rather than going full force with all of these ideas at once, ensure that your strategic HR plan listens to employees and what they require to stay by addressing the priorities first.

Siloed Departmental Communication

If the company is experiencing communication troubles between departments, your strategic human resources plan should include implementing one communication platform that teams will use. This could be something as simple as a messaging platform, like Slack, or a comprehensive organizational and communication service, like Trello or Asana — or both! You can even use SMS marketing to mass text employees and management to ensure ample communication at the right time. This strategy aims to ensure that interdepartmental needs are being met.

Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion

Part of any HR strategic plan is ensuring that diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programs are in place to foster a positive workplace culture. Your strategic HR management should include DEI training, incorporating DEI into your hiring process, starting employee resource groups, and aligning with the business’s goals, values, and mission.

New Technology Opportunities

If your company has identified new technologies that could be useful for boosting its competitiveness, it’s time for the HR team to act. Conduct surveys of different departments to see if certain technologies would be useful and if their employees have the skills to learn and incorporate them into their daily tasks.

If the company currently doesn’t have the talent to use this new tech, it’s time to use SMS for recruiting. SMS marketing is a great solution to complement any recruiting program because you can recruit and engage with employees easily and assist with onboarding once they’ve been hired.

No matter which strategies are best for your company, keep in mind that HR strategies are ongoing and need to be adapted depending on the changing needs of the business, the external environment, or employee needs. Learn more about HR solutions and how they can be tweaked to fit your business needs.