6 min Strategic human resource management (SHRM) is about much more than payroll and policies. It is about differentiating HR from payroll and policies and viewing HR as a business enabler. Organizations with superior alignment between HR and strategy are more likely to attract the best talent, build effectiveness and resilience, and execute on a path for lasting success and growth.
What Is Strategic HR Management?
Strategic HR Management is the alignment of HR practices with organizational strategic goals to ensure that workforce planning, development of talent and performance practices are linked to business goals and objectives and not just HR practice.
In sum, SHRM alters the HR function from a reactive practice to a proactive partner in finding sustainable competitive advantage through tight linkage of people strategies and organizational strategies.
5 Steps to Implement a Strategic HR Management Process
1. Articulate Your Vision and Goals
You need clarity to start with. The HR strategies need to align with the organization’s mission, long-term vision, and business objectives. Involve your executives, department heads, and your employees so that the unique HR agenda aligns with organizational priorities. This phase provides the north star for every other phase.
2. Conduct a Workforce Analysis
In order to change you need to know your current state. You need to develop an understanding of your current workforce in terms of skills, competencies, demographics, and the levels of employee performance.
You should be asking:
- Do we have the future skills needed to achieve our goals?
- Where are the capability gaps?
- What roles are going to be mission critical as our business scales?
A thorough workforce analysis provides the knowledge of the gap between your current state and your strategic goals, giving HR leaders the evidence-based data to take action.
3. Develop HR Strategies and Initiatives
Having identified the gaps, develop HR strategies that close those gaps. This means creating the tactical HR strategies and employing tactical HR solutions that include:
- Recruitment and retention programs
- Training and up-skilling programs
- Performance management systems
- Employee engagement and employee recognition programs
The ultimate goal is to bridge the ability of your workforce with the business needs, so that HR’s role is not limited to filling positions, we can build teams that can scale and take the business into the future.
4. Take Action and Track Progress
Plans are only as good as their execution. Assign ownership, timelines, and resources. Use automation to track, report, and communicate. Most importantly, create feedback loops regularly. An engaged employee gives you the ability to know if the strategies you are implementing will actually work, and if they’ll be embraced and utilized.
Tracking progress also means measuring success. Are your turnover rates going down? Are your engagement scores going up? Conducting a regular review allows you to course correct now rather than later if your intended path is off course.
5. Always Evaluate and Improve Upon
A HR strategy is never “done.” Business needs are constantly changing, new technologies and systems are regularly becoming available, and employee expectations are continuously shifting. That’s why HR leaders must be focused on evaluation of impact at all times. Metrics related to retention, productivity scores, and employee satisfaction surveys, are all elements to help evaluate new strategies, keep HR efforts relevant to current realities, and focus on future goals.
Why does a Strategic HR Management Process Matter
A strategic HR function is more than an operational function:
- It fills gaps in talent by anticipating workforce needs.
- It improves agility, speeding up redeployment and reskilling in rapidly changing markets.
- It improves the employee experience, improving engagement and retention.
- It supports compliance, protecting against violations of labor laws and costly lawsuits.
- It promotes fairness & equity by reducing both pay inequities and inequities in opportunities.
Simply put, strategic HR is not a nice to have, it gives you a competitive advantage.
Why Choose Procloz?
At Procloz, we partner with organizations to advance their HR roles from a primarily administrative HR posture to a true strategic HR function using our expertise in global payroll services, business process outsourcing services, and workforce management.
We enable organizations to:
- Improve HR processes by making functions smooth and reducing inefficiencies.
- Ensure compliance with evolving labor and tax regulations.
- Develop fair and scalable compensation and HR structures.
- Enable leadership time focused on growth, while we manage the complexities, fast and efficiently.
Strategic HR is the starting point of a high-performing workforce. With Procloz, and when you partner with us, you are not just managing people, you are enabling them to create success.
Let us work together at Procloz to create a workforce that is engaged, ready for the future, and aligned.
