In Human Resources, your strategic perspective determines how your company views and solves important issues relating to HR. Organizations struggle to create, implement and carry out their visions because they lack a solid strategic perspective. HR leaders strive to make better decisions on behalf of their company, to coincide with their understanding of the business’s strategic perspective. They must consider the past, present and future of your business objectives, to provide them with the big picture. Senior management makes better decisions in all areas of the company, once it has a strong vision of its objectives.
Unfortunately, having a strategic perspective is much easier theoretically than in practice. Today, we’re going to give five ways HR leaders can improve this important skill, and assist other leaders within their company to provide buy-in.
- Have a well-defined strategic thinking process, and share it with all members of the HR and Talent Acquisition team. In the world of science, the scientific method is the gold standard “thought process.” In HR, it’s important for leadership to apply a strategic process to all problems, to ensure issues are addressed consistently, efficiently and quickly. Do you conduct brainstorming sessions with other leaders within the company? Are you leveraging if-then flowcharts, to provide continuity in decision-making? Just as HR leaders must create policies and procedures for other matters, it is just as important to create and follow a strategic thinking process. If your company lacks this infrastructure, why not create a committee to work on this issue? The only mistake you can make is not getting started.
- Observe and find trends that affect your business. HR and recruitment is the first line of defense in seeing trends in the talent pool. When Compensation identifies rising salaries, and your company is slow to address the change, your organization loses out on hiring the best people. This one issue negatively affects every aspect of your company. Human Resources leaders are in the ideal position to monitor trends, and and strategize on getting ahead of future problems that will result. Are you setting hiring benchmarks and monitoring the results. Does your ATS and VMS provide that important data, so your process is simple? Staying in front of the talent trends can empower your company to become more profitable.
- Gain an understanding on what perspective adds to your organizational goals. All businesses strive to become and remain profitable. HR is gaining more accountability for their role in increasing the bottom line, through their direct impact on recruiting, retention, and reducing the costs associated with acquiring the most impactful human capital. HR leadership must begin to troubleshoot problems from a strategic perspective, to ensure they have the tools and resources to attract top talent, provide competitive salaries and benefits packages, and retain those employees in a more long-term situation. For example, your company may regularly use recruiting agencies to fill C-level and director level roles. Have you evaluated that process? Have you reviewed which agencies are worth using in the future, and who has the most competitive fees? With talent, we often find ourselves willing to pay any fee, because our internal team could not produce results. To add strategic perspective to this problem, think deeper. Do you have a Vendor Management System that streamlines the process of working with agencies? Are you in control of your Vendor contracts, and you set the fee? Are you accessing data and analytics to help you determine which agencies are providing the talent that makes retention problems a non-issue? Learn more about Vendor Management solutions.
- Is HR leveraging the digital intelligence perspective? An effective and practical perspective requires accurate information. Gaining competitive intelligence through the internet has been a typical way of information gathering since the it was introduced. This highly useful method of obtaining data from other companies and end-customers is an increasingly important way to drive business decision making. If you aren’t already, consider optimizing your talent communities and having feedback mechanisms built into your career-social pages. As you review competitors’ websites, make note of how they approach information gathering. This is a crucial piece that strengthens HR’s strategic perspective.
- Embrace conflict as part of your process. The quest to build your strategic skills can be uncomfortable. HR leaders must learn to embrace challenges, and be prepared for opposition to their ideas. Providing organizational leaders with factual information to support your perspective and showing them how your path positively impacts the bottom line is crucial to your success. If others are opposed to change, you must continue showing the leadership the value of making the changes you are proposing.
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