The First 3 Steps Towards Developing a Successful HR Strategy

Strategic human resource management doesn’t just guide your HR team – it can have an impact on every element of your organisation, from attracting the talent that shapes your innovation to realising the full potential of every person and every workday. But a truly effective HR strategy isn’t as simple as filling in a template; it takes a truly custom process. Before you even begin to work on your HR strategy, these three steps are essential in ensuring success.

Recognising the need for a HR strategy

It sounds simple, but this isn’t always so easy to spot when you’re working within an organisation. Often, new clients will come to us with the vague sense that what’s holding them back may be a human resources issue. Here are some of the key signals that your organisation could benefit from a clear, structured HR strategy:

• You feel like you’re treading water: everyone looks busy, yet teams or the organisation itself are failing to reach key objectives.
• Your organisation is being let down by one or more HR process, be it recruitment, training or employment relations.
• Your HR team feels either unsure or frustrated about the organisation’s people practices.
• Management is asking for measurable ROI from HR, without the KPIs set in place to produce these.

Investing the time and resources to get it right

A successful HR strategy doesn’t come from thin air, and an hour spent around the whiteboard is unlikely to result in a meaningful strategy either. Developing any sort of roadmap can take some time and resources to get right, but these investments can pay dividends when your organisation has a robust framework to work with moving forward. Just as important will be identifying the champions of your HR strategy, who can take ownership over the process and ensure it remains relevant over time. Which leads us to the next step…

Working with the right strategists

You might have highly capable in-house HR professionals with strategic expertise, or you might look to a specialist service such as performHR to help guide you through the process. Either way, it’s essential to start with an in-depth understanding of the organisation’s current state as well as the desired future state. Often, an external team like ours can help to identify biases and other potential blind spots that could be holding the organisation back, as well as providing proven steps in developing HR strategies. The strategy process is all about asking the right questions in order to develop a solutions-focused framework for the future.

If you have the sense that strategic human resource planning could provide benefits for your business right now, we’d encourage you to get in touch with your local performHR branch and get started with a discovery call.