HR Strategy and Processes

Does your performance management system actually work? Can you tell the CEO who the most talented people are in the organisation and why that is important to know? What value does HR really provide to the organisation and why not outsource it all?

In order to address these questions HR must have an underlying unifying focus; an HR strategy. The HR strategy is derived from the overall business strategy, and this provides the structure for prioritising processes, their individual design, and their resulting intersection.

HR Strategies are designed by organisations that want to realise the fuller potential of HR and to increase the value that HR brings to the organisation.

An effective HR strategy:

• Links HR processes to business performance through metrics derived from the overall business strategy.
• Coordinates all of the HR department activities as HR processes do not stand alone; they support and interact through data and information sharing.
• Must reflect the business environment: legal and regulatory conditions, market landscape, workforce demographics, competitor changes, social factors, and macro economic factors.
• Reflects the current organisational climate, and drives any planned organisational culture shifts.
• Supports an organisation’s competitive advantage, and mitigates organisation’s weaknesses.
• Has HR policies, procedures and processes that are clearly defined and understood by employees, and are uniformly and consistently utlised by all employees throughout an organisation. Any strategy can be undone at the individual level and if Managers are not uniformly implementing the policies that drive strategy on a day to day basis then your strategy will likely fail.