HR Strategy
More appropriate for larger organisations with established HR departments. If you have strategic business goals you want to accomplish, we’ll help you define the right HR and workforce practices to make them happen. In this case we’d be working with your head of HR. But this service can also be useful for CEOs who want additional support to develop or implement strategy.
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Importance of HR Strategy
Your business goals are achieved by the people in your organisation. People don’t often put HR and business growth in the same sentence. But when carried out properly, HR processes and systems can be instrumental in helping your company to achieve and excel on targets.
As a HR leader, you already know just how much work goes into drafting and executing HR strategies, also known as your People Plan. The Plan can take up to a year to build, not to mention revisions, reviews and adjustments that will need to be made following implementation.
Loop Business Consulting can take some or all of that work off your plate. We’ll develop a comprehensive HR strategy for you. Then you come in and add your experience and insight to take it to the next level. It’s your strategy, we just put it together.
How to Develop Your HR Strategy
If you want to tackle creating your HR strategy solo, here are some of the key things you’ll have to do to make sure it’s a success.
- Start by assessing the organisation’s strengths and weaknesses to scope out areas for improvement.
- HR strategy goes hand in hand with your company’s mission and vision statements. You’ll need to make sure that your strategy reflects your company’s values and culture so that your people are onboard and that their performance is aligned with business goals.
- Evaluate existing employee skill sets and determine their training needs, before analysing performance so you can see where you need to allocate resources.
Who Needs a HR Strategy?
Whether you’re a large company or a growth-stage startup, you’ll need a HR strategy. You know better than anyone else your company relies on its people to get things done. The sooner you get a strategy in place for how you’re going to use those people to get the things you need done, the better it is for you.
Benefits of HR Strategy Planning
Having a solid HR strategy in place gives you a competitive advantage over other companies, and has a massive ROI when done properly.
- Efficient budget allocation
- Reduced turnover
- Increased employee engagement
- Improved productivity
- Attracting top talent
- Ensuring the implementation of better policies
- Minimised disruption caused by conflicts, grievances and organisational change
- Better direction and purpose for employees
- Enhanced employee performance
- Guiding training and development for existing employees
- Supporting strategic initiatives
Best Practices When Implementing a HR strategy
To get your HR strategy off the ground, you’ll need to involve stakeholders, senior leadership and the HR team to get their support. Another thing to consider is budget allocation. By allocating resources appropriately, and having the budget to support the strategy you put forward, your initiatives can be effectively carried out.
It doesn’t stop there. For your efforts to be successful, you’ll need to regularly monitor and adjust the progress and outcomes of your strategy, and ensure that it is aligned with the organisational strategy. You’ll also need to make sure that performance incentives and rewards are aligned with the execution of the strategy to ensure your team is behind you, and that your employees contribute to strategic goals.
Successful HR Strategies in the Current Year
Here’s how to make sure your HR strategy is successful today and keep pace with all the changes happening to work and workplaces.
Companies all over the world are competing for top talent with the rise of remote work, and a once closed market has now gone global. You need to make sure that you’re offering competitive and attractive packages if you want the creme-de-la-creme onboard.
Optimising employee development and training by focusing on personalised learning initiatives, career development programs, and continuous skill-building opportunities ensures your teams are flexible, adaptable and knowledgeable when it comes to getting that edge over your competitors.
Ensure you’ve got robust, ethical frameworks in place, effective policies and procedures, and a proactive risk management strategy to maintain compliance with laws and regulations. You’ll want to make sure you review and update these regularly.
Specialised software can help you to streamline processes, enable data-driven decision-making, and enhance areas such as payroll management, performance evaluation, and workforce planning.
It’s a lot to undertake, and planning an efficient HR strategy takes time. Let us take care of mapping and planning out your strategy so you can focus on the parts of your business that need you the most.
How Do You Know When Your HR Strategy is Successful?
A successful HR strategy meets specific business needs. It can be translated into actionable programs and initiatives that make a quantifiable difference for your business, while taking into account the needs of managers, employees and stakeholders alike.
By aligning HR practices with business objectives, leveraging data-driven insights, and considering the perspectives of stakeholders, we develop HR strategies that drive success, foster employee engagement, and contribute to overall organisational growth for your company.
Common Challenges in HR Strategy/Planning
Developing a HR Strategy is a long and complex process. Many issues need to be resolved along the way. Some key issues we see for our clients in HR planning include:
- Making sure that your teams are aligned and meeting strategic objectives
- Ensuring that objectives are realistic and achievable at all levels
- Making sure your teams are skilled, motivated and in the right place to achieve their targets
When you work with us we make sure these issues never come up. We’ve developed strategies for so many clients that our proven blueprint just works. All we have to do is execute.
Importance of Workforce Planning
Workforce planning is a catch-all term for analysing, forecasting, and planning the supply and demand of talent within your organisation. It combines numerical projections and strategic frameworks to ensure that your company has the right individuals, with the right skills, in the right positions, at the right time to achieve your higher-level goals. Workforce planning aligns your workforce, optimises productivity and equips your organisation to navigate future challenges effectively.
Workforce Planning Best Practices
Some best practices of workforce planning you can include:
- Consulting key stakeholders to get buy-in
- Understanding employee responsibilities and allocating resources
- Providing support to managers
- Obsessively gathering and analysing data
Who needs workforce planning?
Workforce planning is a natural extension of business goals. Where do you want to go? Who do you need to get there? How much do you need to invest to make it happen? At Loop we take all of this into account to give you a thorough analysis of your existing workforce and our recommendations on how to allocate resources for growth. We also help with implementation.
Talent Management
Talent management is the process of recruiting, developing, and retaining a productive workforce by attracting talent with valuable skills, providing learning and development opportunities for your current workforce and having effective reward systems in place to encourage your teams and incentivise good performance.
What Does Good Talent Management Look Like?
Good talent management prioritises workplace culture, offers growth opportunities, ensures employees are leveraging their strengths, provides fair compensation, and strives for diversity in hiring.
Diversity and Inclusion: What’s the Difference?
Why is Diversity and Inclusion Important?
Being diverse and inclusive creates a culture where your employees will feel empowered to be themselves and achieve. Companies that implement diversity and inclusion programs and policies experience higher revenue growth, innovation, better recruitment processes and higher employee engagement and retention rates – which is exactly what you want when you’re in a fast-growing organisation. And perhaps more importantly, your diversity and inclusion metrics will affect who’s willing to invest in your company and how you’re perceived in the marketplace.
Implementing Diversity and Inclusion Initiatives
As a HR leader, the organisation meeting its D&I goals is your responsibility. We can advise you on developing policies and initiatives and even implement them for you.
Engagement and Retention
Engagement and retention are key indicators of a positive employee journey. What are your 12-month team retention numbers? What’s your 12-month voluntary turnover? How are team members responding on engagement surveys?
Why is Engagement and Retention Important?
Best Practices for Engagement and Retention
- Airtight onboarding of new hires
- A well-defined company culture and systems to ensure adoption
- Actively listening to employees
- Clear professional growth trajectories
- Psychological safety and well-being
- Intangible and quality-of-life benefits/perks
Leadership Development
Are you seeing employees leave after 1-2 years to pursue higher level roles? Or does your organisation have a strong culture of people rising through the ranks? Leadership development is designed to improve an individual’s abilities in a leadership role within an organisation. It saves you having to recruit leaders from the outside, by focusing on your existing workforce and giving them the opportunity to grow within your business.
Through leadership development programs at work, employees can develop and improve their skills in decision making, strategy, networking, team management, innovation, and coaching others, to name a few. Leadership development enables you to build strong teams and drive company success.
What Does Good Leadership Development Look Like?
Good leadership development involves cultivating integrity, effective delegation, strong communication, self-awareness, gratitude, learning agility, influence, empathy, courage, and respect. It focuses on the holistic growth of individuals, offering opportunities for self-reflection. It recognises and addresses barriers to growth, creating an environment that nurtures and empowers leaders to reach their full potential within your organisation.
Organisational Development
What Can Organisational Development Do for You?
Organisational Development Practices You Can Implement Today
HR Policies and Procedures
HR policies and procedures are the rules and guidelines that govern employee management. As an experienced HR executive, you’ll have no doubt experienced the joy of putting together your own HR policies and procedures.
That said, they’re essential if you want to be transparent with employers and employees alike about what they can expect, so it’s important that you get them right the first time. They cover areas such as recruitment, dress code, compensation, leave, evaluations, termination, and more. These policies ensure consistency and provide clear principles and responsibilities for managers and employees within an organisation.
Importance of Comprehensive HR Policies
Essential HR Policies and Procedures
- Code of conduct
- Recruitment and termination policies
- Working hours and attendance
- Health and safety guidelines
- Expenses and benefits
- Vacation/leave policy, sick leave, unpaid leave etc.
- Confidentiality
- Anti-discrimination and harassment policies
- Social media guidelines
- Performance and discipline procedures
- Company property regulations
- Bereavement support
- Drug and alcohol policies
- Disability accommodation
- Equal opportunity practices
- Guidelines for workplace romance
Why not let us create these policies for you? We’d do all the heavy lifting. You just provide feedback and guidance.
Next Steps
Whenever you’re ready, here are three ways we can help:
- Contact us for a free consultation
- Check out our case studies
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