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5 Best HR Strategies for Business Growth

By | Sonal Sharma

‘Grow your people to grow your business’–is a fundamental but what does it take to do that?

Just like any other function of business that drives the organization, exponential enterprises need rock solid HR strategies that are in sync with their business objectives to accelerate this growth. CHROs have the ambitious task of prioritizing HR resource investments to achieve the greatest outcomes for their organizations. It cannot be stressed enough that employees are the biggest asset and for them to perform well and support an organization that thrives, efficient HR strategies are the backbone.

Research states with proven data that engaged, and valued employees contribute towards a24% increase in sales. This growth is not only limited to increased sales, but also results in higher customer retention, better referrals and much more. Customers will love an organization only when its employees love the organization. To escalate your business’ growth, it is imperative to put strategic HR management at the center of the organization.Here are 5 thoroughly researched HR strategies that will enable the same:

  • Align Business and HR Strategy
  1. Plan Ahead of Time –Simply put, Identify the business goals and plan your workforce in advance. Understanding the highest attrition departments, high demand roles, and bulk hiring needs within the organization with relevant data would give the HR Teams clear and actionable goals.
  2. Cascade Business Goals – Have step-by-step business goals stated succinctly from individual departments and further drilling down to each employee. This will create a clear visibility of impact of all the people on growth.
  3. Choose the Right Methodology– It is the responsibility of an HR team to suggest better mechanics to ameliorate the performance within the organization. For instance – Would Objective and Key results be a good approach to drive results?Or What KPIs are to be used to measure progress against the stated goals? Etc.Try multiple methodologies, read the use cases of organizations like yours and check what fits best for your team’s success.
  • Drive Strategy for improvedEmployee Experience
  1. Get the Right Talent –Recruitment and Onboarding is no longer under the bucket of the HR. Hiring Managers have a much active and bigger role to play in this part of the employee lifecycle.Businesses should provide ample tools to ease this process for hiring managers, give them a dashboard to clearly see the right resumes for the role and use stack ranking to help prioritizethese bases of skillsets and competencies. This will save time for the Managersand also help them take easier and quicker decisions.
  2. Every Employee as Evangelist – 50% of the highly engaged employees end up sharing messages, videos and pictures of their employers on social media. It is not just the responsibility of theorganization or the HR team to create fans out of your employees. Traditional HR constructs might not be sufficient to create boost-worthy experiences.Hence,driving culture that is diverse yet inclusive should be a priority for not just the HR teams but for all the leaders of the organization. It is a necessity to deliver an employee experience that is out of the ordinary to have them love your organization.
  3. Build an Empathetic Enterprise – If there is one thing that the pandemic has taught us, it is that the employees’ well-being is the front and center of everything. Businesses can drive productivity only through effective employee engagement and improving their overall experience, especially as work goes remote.Darwinbox is relentlessly working towards creating an Empathy Enterprise, a step towards understanding what’s at the heart of effective employee engagement. Leadership must drive this agenda and as an HR one can create regular pulse surveys, push for mandatory coffee breaks, no meeting days and much more.
  4. Establish Alliance with LeadershipChanging needs of the enterprises will require cross functioning. Breaking silos is important toachievesuccess. Constant process of collaboration should be established to discuss the vision of leadership and to support them democratizing the HR duties.
  5. Push Policies and Automation – HRs are the new change drivers. While they create the right boundaries and ensure aclear distinction between different roles and permissions, they need to become the advocates of innovation and novelty.HRs should stay ahead of all the automations.
  • Champion Technology
  1. Spend Less Time on Operations – Monotonous tasks like sending offer letters, query resolutions, document signing etc. can be easily automated using structured workflows. Bulk tasks such as acceptingor rejecting candidates should be automated to allow HR teams to save time. All in all, mundane tasks can be automated for the time to be used to do a more productive and resourceful work.
  2. Promote Self-Service – Introduce services like Chatbots which allow easy ESS, and MSS. Bots should be well programmed to answer policy related to helping managers find out who is available for the day. Make sure these queries can be answered where your employees are. Integration with communication platforms like MicrosoftTeams, Slack and other business apps will just make things easier for the employees and at the same time will free up HRs to pick up more strategic duties.
  • Create Talent Marketplace
  1. Talent Pools–It is the era of ‘Big Quit’ and the ‘Great Resignation’. Today, Employers can easily drive employeesto quit and thus being aware of the internal and external pool of talent is of key significance. Tools that allow to constantly stay in touch with existing employees and at the same time create a repository of possible good fits based on the right skills and competencies will help stay prepared before the wakeup call.
  2. Unambiguous criterion for people and profiles – It is extremely crucial to communicate job roles distinctlyto people in the organization. New Job requirements should always come with clearly defined set of skills required and each contributor in the hiring cycle should be aware of the same.
  3. Develop and Retain Talent–Other than driving better employee performance, developingand upskilling your talent can exceedingly help the employees feel much more engaged and considerably reduce the turnover rates. The ROI of upskilling goes a long way. It is visible through a report by LinkedIn that shows that upskilling and reskilling is the top priority for nearly 60% of the leadership. When skills are mapped clearly to job roles it becomes easier to identify and attach training as per the desired career path. Suggest courses, define timelines for course completion and automate the whole process to manage and track your investments.
  • Leverage Data
  1. Define and Track Data from the start –It is easy to lose track of data, especially when it is the case of human resources. Since many aspects of it are thought to be intangible and hence defining parameters to track results often gets difficult. But there are several parameters like revenue per employee, cost per hire, employee engagement score, turnover rates, employee productivity ratewhich can directly be linked to business outcomes. What is key in this case is to pick and choose the parameters that are of the utmost importance for your business.
  2. Provide adequate dashboards for leadersHRs are to make life easier for leaders.Primary concerns of understanding people analytics and data can be resolved by providing access to dashboards that have the X and Y axis defined as per the objectives that theorganization is trying to meet.
  3. Send Reports Regularly –Create consumable reports and maintain consistency in sending them to the leadership. For instance, these reports could be – ‘top department of the week with highest employee engagement’ or ‘percentage of employee engagement in the past quarter’ etc. Publish scores for each parameter cross functionallyto the leadership to create an ecosystem that pushes each team to perform better.

Conclusion

The aforementioned HR strategies can come in handy when an organization is looking at ways to flourish their business. It is no myth that even though it is an ‘HR’ strategy, it encompasses all the other functions of the business. In other words, it is a myopic perspective to think that HR strategies are developed by HR professionals alone. In fact, a holistic HR strategy would consider the voices from leaders of all the verticals of an organization. Also, HR strategies are not ‘hard-coded’ or ‘set-in-stone’ strategies. They differ for organizations based on function and scale. And thus, an effective strategy is always customized and personalized accordingly.

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