Strategic Planning

Strategic HR Management: A Proactive Approach to Improving Engagement

What is strategic human resource management?

Strategic HR management is essential to any organization looking to align their team to their overall strategic plan. It represents a proactive approach by organizations to support and engage employees while also promoting the achievement of company goals. Extensive planning and research goes into:

  1. How a company as a whole can better meet the needs of its staff, and;
  2. How employees can best utilize their skills to contribute to the success of the organization.

Basic strategies and goals will then start to form around how organizations can cultivate a work environment and culture that encourages engagement, team collaboration, and productivity. Following that, HR departments will begin looking into how they can improve recruitment practices, provide more ongoing training for their employees, and establish effective retention strategies.

The purpose of strategic human resource management

As you can see, strategic human resource management is so much more than just “putting the right people in the right job.” And, those organizations who believe measuring whole-hearted engagement and productivity can be done once a year with a cookie cutter performance review questionnaire may meet with some challenges.

Put very simply, an organization wants to be able to:

  1. Attract the best employees
  2. Retain their best employees
  3. Continue to develop their employees

A new trend: Strategic HR is changing the way we value and manage our employees

There have been new trends emerging in how companies big and small choose to value and manage their team members:

1. Innovation and engagement

HR departments and C-Level management are now actively seeking out new and innovative ways to engage and connect their employees back to the organization’s goals.

2. Whole-hearted, employee-focused plans

Strategic HR planning techniques are being adopted to help formulate plans that guide individual employees in successfully meeting their personal and professional goals.

Whether you’re a Fortune 500 company or a fast-growing start up, road mapping your organization towards building an employee-focused human resources plan that’s directly connected to the overall strategic plan is just good business sense. Why? Because the success of your organization is directly related to employee engagement and productivity.

What’s included in a strategic HR plan:

  1. Recruiting tactics: How to find and hire the right talent that just so happens to also be a great fit with your organizational culture.
  2. On-boarding and ongoing training programs
  3. Employee succession planning
  4. What to do during times of economic downturns and expansions
  5. Employee relations and retention plans

By delving into each of the above elements, an organization is able to effectively plan for how they can successfully manage their human resources. Join us next week as we explore the first steps in creating an HR management plan that’s aligned with your organization’s strategic plan.

Mike Bell

Mike has dedicated his professional and personal life to seeking out challenges – traveling to the edge of his comfort zone and then pushing a bit further. He’s a serial entrepreneur, combining his thirst for adventure with his drive for doing work that matters. Mike is a recognized expert in local government strategic planning, performance management, and comparative benchmarking.

Mike’s passion for public service drives him and his team to build more efficient, transparent, and trusted public sector agencies. As ‘private sector public servants’ the Envisio team helps to align the work of governments with the needs of their communities by activating strategic plans, engaging employees, measuring performance, and reporting on results.

Mike is father to three girls and an avid skier, golfer, badminton, player and photographer.

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