Strategic Human Resource Management: Welcome to the New-age HR Revolution

Strategic human resource management (SHRM), or "people strategy," is the practice of forming a cohesive planned structure for employees to get recruited, managed, and nourished in ways that underpin a company’s long-term goals. SHRM aims to fulfill the strategic objectives of a business, including:

• Developing organizational practices

• Improving corporate work culture

• Innovative strategies and ideas for competitive advantage

SHRM helps ensure that the different elements of people management join forces to drive the behavior and climate required to create value and reach performance targets. It addresses prolonged people issues, synchronizing resources with future requisites, and at-scale concerns about quality, structure, values, culture, and commitment.

Benefits of Strategic Human Resource Management for a Thriving Business

When done correctly, the SHRM offers myriads of benefits. Let’s delve into them.

Building an Adaptable and Balanced Workplace

The strategic HR managers grease the workforce wheels to ensure employees can adapt to the recent shifts faster. Learning and development is the primary key to building a flexible and balanced work culture.

Motivating employees to expedite their workability, produce innovative ideas, and embrace a digital disruption can trigger significant positive changes. Besides, balancing friction and staving off gender diversity is another priority for strategic HR management.

Over the last years, the Strategic HRM has identified the core focus areas among which improving the employee experience, fostering critical skills, competencies for the organizations, and bolstering current and future leadership are the major highlights.

Onboarding the Right Workforce at the Right Time, Right Place

Stationing the right work employees, and more importantly, the right leaders, at the right place is equally essential alongside at-scale digital transformation.

Today, many HR managers struggle to appoint leaders at a company. Not producing the right leaders at the right time might result in potential consequential damages to the business.

The strategic HRM accesses the organizational goals, spots changes, monitors employee caliber, and leverages innovative ideas to appoint employees at the right workplace. Instead of unfolding vacancies for the leadership level, the strategic HR management takes actions to assess the skills of the existing workforce and promote them.

Happy, Productive Employees

Various studies reckon that the current workforce lacks motivation and engagement toward the companies they work for. Barely 1 out of 10 employees put high intent and discretionary efforts to stay focused on their jobs.

In tandem with the managing department, strategic HRM implements proactive and mart measures to shed light on the workforce. For example, tracking performances and incentivizing employees through gift cards, travel vouchers, or marginal increments are some tricks SHR managers use to motivate the workforce and ensure high-grade performances.

The Strategic Human Resource Management Planning Process

Before companies implement SHRM, they’ll need to devise a strategic HR planning process following the steps below:

Understand Business Objectives

Whether it’s expansion into new markets, rising market penetration, or a stronger bottom line, once organizations define goals, they can create short- and long-term strategies to make those objectives possible.

With this blueprint in mind, the HR personnel can then kick-start the process of implementing SHRM effectively.

Evaluate Workforce Ability

Assessing the existing HR capabilities will enable companies to understand the employees at their disposal and how they contribute to meeting the goals. Moreover, organizations should perform a skills inventory for each employee. Skills inventories help determine which employees are specialists in select domains.

Also, it helps single out the employees who show an interest in getting trained in a specific aspect of the company. A great time to evaluate all these details is during the periodic performance reviews.

Analyze Your HR Capabilities

Examining the HR capacity will help companies recognize the hurdles and execute an action plan to capitalize on the opportunities and effectively address the threats.

Is the HR division armed and prepared to do the job of SHRM? Do the crew members have adequate training and knowledge?

If not, organizations might need to make some tweaks within the division, offer on-the-job coaching, or onboard new talent to support the transition.

Examine Each Department

Once the HR department is all set, it’s time to cut them loose to determine the other divisions that contribute to the business to bring them all into sync with the organization’s strategies and goals.

The purpose of this surveillance is to uncover every department’s distinct needs and how HR can provide talent to ensure up to 100% performance.

Start Hiring To Satiate Departmental Needs

With department needs in consideration, the HR personnel can then start onboarding to cater to those requirements.

While some departments might demand specific skills, others might need crew members who fit more readily into the current corporate culture.

With SHRM, companies can recruit the best candidates to take their business to higher scales.

That’s a Wrap

There’s always a human element to the realization of an organizational goal. Businesses are more likely to create success stories when all teams are working towards the same objectives.

Strategic HRM is a crucial aspect of a forward-looking growth-oriented company. Companies don’t have to employ a particular number of employees before considering carrying out SHRM principles. Indeed, if they’ve got a plan up their sleeves to propel their business, they need to think about connecting this growth to SHRM.

Interested to know more about SHRM and how complex and diverse companies use it? Explore IIM Lucknow’s Executive Program in Strategic HR, designed by the leading faculty at IIM Lucknow and Wiley.

With concentrations in people analytics, diversity and inclusion management, and talent development, this flexible 6-month program will help you step up your performance management skills and cultural competence. Miles Education is the Official Channel Partner for this program.

Miles Education is India's #1 CPA, CMA & CFA with presence across India, Middle East & US. Miles Education up-skills students & professionals to be future-ready with a career progression in Accounting & Finance.