We have been looking at reasons to outsource your HR over the last few weeks and covered the areas of : –
- Staying on the right side of employment law
- Saving time
- Saving money
- Hiring the right people
Maybe strategy and growth are not the first thoughts that spring to mind as to where HR can support, but let’s look at how important they are: –
Building your strategy
You can look at this in two ways……
Firstly, if you’re spending time on your people issues within the business you are not spending time on your business strategy to grow your business and achieve your goals and ambitions. Outsourcing your HR activities on a transactional and / or advice level can enable you to spend time on your business rather than in it.
Secondly use your outsourced HR as an integral part to your business and assist with devising your strategy and ensuring the alignment to your people strategy. They can facilitate the implementation and actions through your team.
Strategy doesn’t always need to look at growth, you may be planning to diversify, introduce new products or preparing your business for acquisition.
Whatever your business goals, do they align with your people strategy? HR will be able to consider the risks and challenges of implementing and achieving this strategy. You may want to use a SWOT analysis to identify the risks you may be facing and to be to consider actions to mitigate them?
Workforce Planning
This is a core business process to align the needs of the business with your people strategy and balances labour supply (skills) against the demand for your services or products.
You would carry out an analysis of your current employees against what you will require in the future, thus determining the gap required to meet your goals.
Workforce planning can also identify any inefficiencies and reduce your labour costs by considering redeployment and flexibility.
Do you have the right employees?
By identifying the gap from your workforce planning activity, you can ascertain what skills you currently have and require in the future.
If your strategy is purely growth of your current products or services, you may be looking at attracting new talent to your business similar to roles you already have? In these instances, identify where you will find this talent and how, where and when you advertise. Be mindful of unconscious bias though and refer to our previous blog last week on ‘Hiring the right people’.
If you are diversifying into different markets or developing new products or services – does this require a new skill set or development of your existing staff?
You may be looking at preparing your business for acquisition, in which case you may need to review your workforce and their roles and responsibilities to ensure its robust and attractive to sell.
Retention matters?
You need your employees to be able to deliver your strategy and it is therefore very important to retain the talent you already have. People are at the heart of your business, the real bread and butter. It’s important to promote purpose over process and help employees understand their ‘why’ to build employee engagement. Engaged employees are more likely to want to stay with your business, be more productive and contribute to meaningful work. Job satisfaction and supportive management are key to building engagement. Are you offering competitive benefits, flexible working arrangements and an attractive working environment? Think about a benchmark exercise to compare your offering with similar industries, carry out exit interviews to understand why people leave and what improvements you could make.
Filling the gaps
You have identified the skills gaps from your workforce planning. In order to fill those gaps one option is to develop your existing staff. Developing your staff is a key part of any people strategy. It will improve retention, productivity and can be more effective than new hires who may require more training to get up to speed with the way you work.
Next week’s blog will cover in more detail training and upskilling your staff.
Good HR can deliver recruitment, training, engaging, and retaining your talent which is essential for organisational effectiveness.
Any concerns?
If you are still not sure, find our previous blogs, staying on the right side of employment law, how you can save time and money, how to handle difficult conversations and hiring the right people.
We have more to come next week with training and upskilling your employees.
Outsourced HR Company – Support Services & Advice – HR Dept Bishop’s Stortford and Halstead CM6 1WZ
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