How HR can help you grow your business / organisation?

In most businesses the key to growth lies within the power of the team and their engagement with the aims, objectives and strategy.  An engaged, talented and motivated team driving the business can make the success happen, so the strategy to build and develop this team is all important and could benefit for the advice and support of HR professionals. This article sets out the various mechanisms to weave HR into your business strategy and how HR is an integral part of an overall growth strategy.

Clarity of business goals, values and strategic direction

All aspects of your business will benefit from a clear business strategy and your people will be able to benefit for clearly defined objectives woven into all aspects of the employee real estate.  Engagement and involvement in exercises to define core values, mission statements and people strategies which draw on and build from the business plan will enrich the fabric of the business and improve understanding and engagement with the business for stakeholders, customers and staff at all levels.

Building a People Strategy

This is a core building block on determining your approach to leading, managing and engaging with your team.   This could be a bottom-up exercise which taps into the ideas, talents and perspectives of everyone and sets a direction of travel for the development of the team.  It should build on the main strategic objectives of the business and set out how people will contribute to the achievements of these objectives.

The HR team can support you through this process, helping you to identify the most appropriate approach to build, build out the broad areas of the strategy, facilitate gathering ideas and momentum and communicating outcomes and ensuring continual development, evaluation and engagement so that your people strategy become the core of overall strategic framework.

Talent acquisition and retention

In a crowded marketplace with rampant salary competition, you need to be able to stand out from the crowd and have a strong meaningful message to attract a good range of candidates from which to make a fair choice.  Having ownership of the messaging, a robust process to administer applicants, rigorous selection and decision-making processes will help you make this manageable.  

Your HR team will be able to set out an appropriate acquisition strategy, support the process and allow you to make the right decisions.  They can assist with onboarding, induction and establishing the metrics that will allow you to retain the talent that you have attracted.

Pay, reward and benefits

How you determine salary structures, identify and offer benefits which have meaningful traction with employees and build a reward structure that keeps you competitive in the marketplace, meets your budget and satisfies the appetite of your employees.  There are many different strategies to structure pay and reward and your HR team can work with you to identify the most appropriate for your business in your sector.

Policies, procedures and practices

Having a sound contractual base with relevant and understandable policies to provide a consistent and fair working environment is key to the success of running a successful business.   These will improve your prospects of providing clarity of expectations and remedies to all staff, employees and managers and allow you to express the type of employer you are, through your policy provisions.  It will also support you keeping on the right side of employment law and lower your risk of falling foul of remedies open to employees through the tribunal system.

Your HR team can draft policies, procedures and contracts that suit the needs of your business, they can assist communicating these to your employees, train your managers on how to exercise the provisions and fulfil their management responsibilities and can advise on those tricky cases that occur from time to time.

Diversity and Inclusion

The statistics show that the benefits of adopting an inclusive workplace will assist in recruitment, talent acquisition, decision making, employee engagement and more.  Your HR team will go beyond collecting the diversity data, they will work with you to implement the strategies that weave through your employment fabric to create a workplace to which people can bring their whole self.

Wellbeing

The stresses and strains of life in and out of the workplace can take their toll on health and wellbeing, negatively impacting attendance at work and productivity for those who remain at work.  Your HR team can help you to develop a culture and environment that supports the management of wellbeing, that allows the conversations to happen and resolution strategies to be identified.  Having an active wellbeing strategy is a key part of your engagement strategy and defines the kind of employer that you really are.  

Your HR team will work with you to build the culture that embraces wellbeing, trains managers to be receptive to the needs of employees and help you to introduce initiatives that will speak to the needs of your employees.