1. Review your current HR offering

Once you’ve found the purpose and it aligns with company-wide objectives, you should review current HR provisions. Doing so will help you understand what has worked and what could be done differently. Conducting a review will give you a good foundation to work from too, so you’re not starting completely from scratch.

After reviewing current processes and practices, it’s time to start formulating the strategy – starting with the goals and sub-goals you’ll be aiming to achieve.

2. Set targets

Setting goals early on in the process gives you direction and something to work towards. In the early days of implementing new frameworks, like strategic HR practices, it’s crucial you define what success looks like.

When setting these goals, it’s important they contribute to the overall business strategy. For example, the goals of the company are to increase sales by 20%, your HR goal might be to recruit X amount of new sales staff or develop existing employees. 

 

As well as setting goals, it’s good practice to set sub-goals. These act as milestones and are useful for monitoring progress. Using the example of recruiting more staff members, a sub-goal could be creating a new job description or posting a job advert before a certain date. 

When you’re setting targets, it can be good to utilise SWOT analyses and SMART goals to help inform your planning. 

 

What is a SWOT analysis? 

A SWOT is used to identify the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats relating to an individual, department, business or project. Conducting a SWOT analysis will give you foresight into the factors that affect the goals you outline as part of a strategic HR framework. 

 

What are SMART goals? 

SMART stands for specific, measurable, achievable, relevant and time-bound. Using these parameters when goal setting helps ensure that goals are challenging, pertinent and achievable within the timeframe you have set.

 

3. Establish your objectives

At this stage of planning, it’s time to determine your objectives, i.e. outline the things you’ll do to reach your goals and subgoals. Again, these objectives should align with the business’s overall direction to ensure consistency. 

 

Continuing with the example of hiring more staff members to increase sales; an objective could be sitting down with the head of sales to ascertain what they want from a new member of staff and using this to inform writing your job description, or hiring sales staff members with a particular number of years’ experience.

 

4. Choosing an approach 

Once you’ve laid the foundations of what you want to achieve and the tasks you can undertake to ensure success, it’s time to consider how you will approach the new framework. 

At this stage, your review of the current HR provision will be useful as it’s time to decide whether to change the approach or not. The three main types of approaches are: 

 

• Reinforcement – reinforcing current practices and processes
• Change – making adjustments to current practices and processes
• Innovation – introducing new ideas and processes

 

5. Implementation

Once you’ve identified success, set targets, reviewed your current processes and decided how you’ll fulfil your strategic approach to HR, it’s time to implement your plan.

When implementing your plan, it’s important to be aware of how it may be received by the workforce. 

 

Depending on what you’re planning to do, people may feel threatened by the changes. For example, if you’re implementing changes to processes or new training initiatives, older employees may feel like they are being pushed out or replaced by new technologies. 

The success of your implementation strategy can depend on your approach to the next step too… 

 

6. Monitoring and evaluation

Once your plan is implemented, you need to monitor and evaluate its performance to ensure continued success and that those objectives are contributing to the completion of goals and subgoals.

Your HR strategy should be a living framework that grows and adapts based on what you find while monitoring. You can monitor performance by:

• Surveying and interviewing people
• Observation sessions

 

Likewise, evaluating goals and objectives once they have been completed is crucial to inform future strategies. Similar to the initial review you undertook before fleshing out your strategic approach. 

 

If your business objective is to grow sales and you have identified a need for new sales staff, you could evaluate the performance of this strategy by looking at how successful the recruitment process was. This could include how long it took you to hire staff, the calibre of people interviewed and how successful applicants have contributed to sales.