Several organizations have begun emphasizing on HR strategies that guide them in successfully meeting their missions. Regardless of the size of the business, you can develop a strategic plan for HR management and support the future direction of the business.

Does your business have an HR strategy? If it doesn’t, this article will help you understand how to develop one, and what important aspects are to be considered in the process.

Having an HR strategy helps businesses align their organizational goals with their HR capabilities. The motive behind strategic planning is to discover what a company wants to do and accomplish in the industry. HR experts recommend businesses have a strategy in place to support and achieve their organization’s goals.

A strategic HR Plan helps organizations align human resources to corporate strategy. In other words, this plan would help the employers decide what skills, knowledge and competencies the business is going to need to grow and survive in the industry. By making sure that the business has the right people in the right numbers in the right job roles, you’ll be one step closer to ensuring the profitability of your business.

The Strategic HRM Planning Process

The strategic HR management planning process has the following five steps:

Step 1: Evaluating the Current HR Capacity

This step requires you to assess the knowledge, skills and abilities of your current staff. You can do so by developing a skills inventory for each employee. The skills inventory should not be limited to the skills needed for the particular position. For instance, leadership, volunteering skills, education levels and certificates, etc. can be part of the list. An employee's performance assessment form can be reviewed to determine if the person is willing to learn and take on more responsibilities in the future.

Step 2: Estimating HR Requirements

The next step, being the most important one in the process, deals with forecasting HR needs for the future, based on the organization’s strategic goals. This will require an estimation of both demand and supply, and you’ll have to consider the challenges that may arise in meeting the needs.

Step 3: Gap Analysis

In this stage, you determine the gap between where your organization currently is, and where it wants to be in the future. A major component of the gap analysis is the identification of the number of staff, the skills and abilities required in the future by comparing it to the current situation.

Step 4. Developing HR Strategies

To meet your organization's future needs, strategies that focus on matters such as staffing, performance management, training/development, compensation/rewards, employee relations, safety and health, and workforce diversity should be considered. You’ll have to take care of the five aspects stated below:

• Training and development strategies: These strategies include providing staff with training to take on new roles as well as preparing them for future jobs in your organization. Employers may pay for employees to upgrade their skills or offer them on-the-job training.

• Recruitment strategies: Here you make plans to recruit new staff with the skill and abilities to meet future needs. This will require you to strategically promote job openings and encourage suitable candidates to apply.

• Restructuring strategies: In case your evaluation indicates that there is an oversupply of skills, there are a variety of options open to assist in the adjustment. You may reduce the staff either by termination or attrition, regroup tasks to create well-designed jobs, and reorganize work units to be more efficient.  

• Outsourcing strategies: Making use of external individuals or organizations to complete some of your tasks is an important aspect. This can come in handy when there’s a need to complete specific and specialized tasks that don't require ongoing full-time work.

• Collaboration strategies: By collaborating with other organizations you may have better chances of success at dealing with a shortage of certain skills. Doing so could be beneficial as they let you share the costs of training for groups of employees, or allow your employees to visit other organizations to gain skills and insights.

Step 5:  Monitoring and Reviewing the Plan

A vital component of the success of strategic HR planning is to monitor the progress of the plan, and review if it has helped you achieve the organizational goals in factors like production, profit, employee retention, and employee satisfaction. If everything is running smoothly, continue with the plan. Should there be any barriers, you can experiment with different aspects to choose the ones that better suit your company’s needs. Make sure you communicate successes or modifications to your team. The plan should be reviewed every year to verify its alignment with the goals.

Final Thoughts

An all-inclusive HR strategy is instrumental in achieving organizational goals. We hope the step-by-step process outlined in this article will guide you as you develop a strategy for your business.

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