When it comes to business, your work goes beyond making your customers happy. Sure, you want to improve customer success—but you also have an opportunity to care for your employees. To do that, you need an integrated HR strategy that can keep your people happy and engaged.
A well-integrated HR strategy can improve your longer-term human resource issues and maximize your organization’s performance. Here’s everything you need to know:
What Is An Integrated HR Strategy?
To understand an integrated HR strategy, you first need to know the proper function of a human resources department. An HR or human resources department is responsible for handling the employment allocations of a business.
It is responsible for recruiting, hiring, onboarding, and training new employees. It is also in charge of payroll, employee benefits, and terminations.
An integrated HR strategy combines all these functions in a workflow, allowing every task to update other functions. For example, an optimized leave-management process enables the department to automatically adjust schedules and payroll to ensure everyone gets equal opportunities for time off.
An effective strategy helps an organization achieve its business objectives by ensuring employees have the skills, knowledge, and motivation to achieve their individual goals, whatever they may be. For example, the HR department can help the business meet its financial targets by implementing specific strategies to improve productivity.
Benefits of An Integrated Human Resources Strategy
HR teams are familiar with government regulations regarding labor and employment law and can efficiently resolve issues that negatively impact the productivity of their employees.
An integrated HR strategy helps the company adhere to industry standards and regulations while improving the organization’s profitability, minimizing labor costs, and streamlining the recruitment, training, and selection process. Proper data security also helps HR maximize its people’s capabilities without sacrificing employee satisfaction.
Having a single system for all HR processes allows your employees to communicate with each other without wasting time on non-productive tasks. It also facilitates better teamwork—when everyone knows what’s going on, they can work more cohesively!
A fully-integrated HR strategy also ensures the information flows smoothly within your business. When departments across your company can access all the information they need in real-time, they can make better decisions.
An efficient HRA also helps boost the productivity of your team. When people know the benefits they are entitled to, they can plan their time accordingly. They can focus on their work and get more work done.
The entire integration process helps reduce operational costs, as a centralized database accessible anywhere reduces the amount of time spent on administration. It also allows your teams to use their own time more efficiently.
Aligning HR Strategy With Business Strategy
An HR strategy is only effective when it aligns with the company’s overall business strategies related to growth, retention, and talent engagement.
A smart HR strategy should create a strong connection between your people and your business objectives. A human resources team should know how to communicate on behalf of the employees while keeping business interests in mind.
HR teams should support various aspects of the business plan, from attracting and retaining talents, to preserving corporate culture, diversifying, and innovating. Optimization can significantly improve customer service, product quality, and operational efficiency.
How To Develop Good Human Resource Strategies
Creating a strategy is an iterative process that takes time. It involves many steps, including:
- Identifying your key stakeholders within the organization
- Assessing the current state of the business with key performance indicators
- Establishing a long-term vision
- Defining actionable objectives and measuring your success
- Creating an implementation roadmap
- Managing the implementation
Let’s take a look at how you can do these.
1. Identifying Key Stakeholders
Identify your key players in the business and categorize them based on their needs, roles, and responsibilities. Identify which segments need optimization from your human resources team, which may include executives, managers, and supervisors.
Your human resources should create an inclusive environment for all workers. You should also include everyone in the hiring process of new recruits, from the receptionist to the CEO. Understand what they need and what can help them do their jobs better.
2. Assessing the Current State of the Organization
Your next step is to assess the current state of the organization and how recruitment can improve it. Consider the strengths and weaknesses of your current hiring practices. What do you have in place already? What are your limitations? Are people turning down job offers? Is attendance a challenge? Do employees stay with you for a long time?
It’s crucial to be honest about your operations so you can prioritize issues most in need of attention.
3. Establishing Long-Term Goals
Based on the issues you noticed, what changes would you like to see in your organization?
Setting attainable, measurable, and achievable (AMA) goals and metrics can guide your action plan and help you gauge your progress toward your vision. It can also help you identify areas for improvement.
4. Creating an Implementation Roadmap
Create an action plan, detailing how each goal will be achieved. Your human resources team should detail the resources, timing, and milestones needed to reach them.
Try to identify the major milestones in your plan and lay out the actions you’ll take to achieve them. You can also map out the roles and responsibilities of each team member.
5. Managing the Improvement Process
Once your team is aligned, you need to stick with your strategies and work hard to make them a reality. Hold regular meetings to check your progress, and discuss any issues that may hinder your progress.
Measure and evaluate the success of your strategy with the right metrics. Discard what doesn’t work for your overall business culture and continue improving strategies that promote successful practices.
The Bottom Line
An integrated HR strategy that aligns with your overarching business goals can build on your business in many ways. It can drive lasting changes in how you operate and help you maximize your investments. It can also improve your profit margins, and boost your employee engagement.
When it works well, it can enhance employee engagement and productivity while reducing unnecessary costs, and improving company culture.
