This is How You Develop a Sustainable HR Strategy for Your Company

1. Why do companies need an HR strategy at all?
2. A well-established HR department understands the company's goals, knows how the company actually earns its money and is involved in important decisions. Especially with the latter topic, there is still a lot to be done, but more on that in a moment.
3. So what is meant by an HR strategy?
4. Here it becomes clear: there is a great variety of HR topics which are oriented towards the "Employee Life Cycle" (the path which employees go through from recruitment to offboarding and perhaps even reboarding).
5. Especially in recruiting, many questions and challenges arise. To make your work easier, there are different applicant management software. It is also worth paying attention to
6. Whether you do this in
7. What is the situation with diversity in the company, how many employees work part-time, how many work full-time?
8. Workations
9. The good news is:

"Culture eats strategy for breakfast" - you probably know this saying and nowhere is it so apt as in HR. The strategy of the HR sector largely determines the corporate culture in organizations.

How diverse and open the corporate culture is, is already determined during recruiting. How "equal" everything really is, new colleagues experience directly with onboarding and familiarization. How "flat" hierarchies and career paths are, is shown by how quickly employees leave the company to make a career elsewhere.

Therefore, we show you how to develop a sustainable HR strategy for your company.

Why do companies need an HR strategy at all?

As hopefully clear in the introduction: Modern HR work is not just "a little bit of contract issuing and payroll accounting". Sure, these components must also be professionally processed in a modern HR department and even this is becoming more and more demanding.

But these activities should be embedded in a WHY and WHERE TO. "What are we actually doing here, what is it paying off and what do we want to achieve with it?" - the development of an HR strategy actually begins with these questions.

HR is always faced with the challenge of having many stakeholders which it must serve: the management, team leads, colleagues, employees, tax and payroll offices, candidates...

A modern HR department therefore cannot work in isolation, it has many more or less clear tasks. And that's where the real issue is: are the tasks one has really so clear and do they actually provide added value for the company?

A well-established HR department understands the company's goals, knows how the company actually earns its money and is involved in important decisions. Especially with the latter topic, there is still a lot to be done, but more on that in a moment.

So what is meant by an HR strategy?

An HR strategy is first and foremost the planned action and design of the interplay of the individual HR fields of action and stakeholders. The various fields of action in HR include, for example, personnel planning, recruiting, onboarding, employee development, retention (i.e., keeping employees), offboarding, design of salaries, bonuses, and benefits.

Here it becomes clear: there is a great variety of HR topics which are oriented towards the "Employee Life Cycle" (the path which employees go through from recruitment to offboarding and perhaps even reboarding).

Pouring these topics into a "plan" and thus a strategy also means first taking a stock of the status quo and defining a target or ideal state. Getting from the status quo to this ideal state usually does not work in one step. The path to the goal should therefore be divided into different steps and these steps should receive a timeframe and responsibilities.

In a comprehensive strategy, it quickly becomes clear that the topics cannot often be viewed in isolation from each other but are intertwined. Also, HR is often in the position that to achieve the individual strategic milestones, they need other departments and stakeholders. Like colleagues from the marketing department, from finance, management or even external service providers - a comprehensive strategy (not only for HR) has some dependencies that should be considered.

• In the past, HR and personnel strategies were made for 5-10 years, but in today's rapidly changing environmental conditions, they are more likely to be 1-2 year horizons. The economy and the market are now changing so fast that it is worth planning short-term goals in more detail, but still keeping long-term goals in sight.
• How do you create a sustainable and good HR strategy?
• Perhaps first the bad news: "We want to hire 100 new colleagues by the end of next year" - this is not a strategy. This is at most a work order that wants to be filled.
• The typical questions that arise as a reaction to this statement from a strategically thinking HR person are then:
• In which areas are we looking for people?
• What do the job profiles look like?
• On which platforms can we approach potential candidates?

How do we manage to handle the volume?

What systems and tools do we need for this?

How can we design the onboarding process to ensure that new colleagues arrive quickly and well?How much budget do I actually have for all this?With these questions, we are in the middle of developing an HR strategy! Developing an HR strategy means more than just "hiring" 100 people.

Through the strategy, a new corporate culture emerges, new demands on the company and the people who work in it are created. HR managers with a strong strategy therefore always have a major influence on the culture in the company.

• Personio
• Workday HCM
• Kenjo (Kenjo kostenlos testen)
• Leapsome

Especially in recruiting, many questions and challenges arise. To make your work easier, there are different applicant management software. It is also worth paying attention to

Recruiting-KPIs.

Helpful tools are, for example: That's why you need clear decisions in the development of an HR strategyThe recruiting example from the previous section shows: you can quickly get lost in many questions. Therefore, it is important that the HR department develops a picture of where the company is currently and what the most urgent topic needs to be done first.

Quickly hiring 100 people often means that long-standing employees receive less attention. Often less time and money is invested in further education or the expansion of existing team structures. This inevitably leads to knowledge carriers leaving the company. And so, there is another position to fill...

So clear decisions are needed and topics also need to be weighed against each other. For this purpose, it is advisable to visualize and write down all topics - no matter how small or at the end of the priority list.

Whether you do this in

Miro boards

, on post-its, in certain tools or in Excel: the main thing is to give yourselves an overview of all the topics you have to handle.

Then it's time to: prioritize honestly! What can you actually achieve? Remember: Your week also has a maximum of 40 working hours!

• By the way, this is where one of the most popular strategy traps lurks: HR is so busy with the topics that they burn out and no longer have any nerves for the "small topics" that make a difference for individual employees. You should definitely avoid this!
• Who decides on a good HR strategy
• A well-balanced HR strategy cannot be developed alone by HR professionals. It needs the management and it also needs the feedback of the employees. It is absolutely advisable to get a picture of the status quo in terms of satisfaction, working conditions, leadership and other cultural parameters in employee surveys.
• There are also various tools and providers on the market to enable conscientious implementation. Even HR software providers have already integrated this area of surveys and questionnaires in their suites.

A good data basis and a comprehensive overview are indispensable for a reliable HR strategy. Surveys, but also structured data about the staff are important.

What is the situation with diversity in the company, how many employees work part-time, how many work full-time?

What is the age structure and how long do employees stay on average in the company?

• What does the salary structure look like and how does it compare to the market?
• How many overtime hours are there and do these pile up somewhere?
• So strategy also always has to do with numbers, evaluations and above all with looking inside AND outside.

By the way, looking outside:What others are doing does not have to be right for your companyIf you open LinkedIn these days, you will practically be bombarded with employer branding postings, suggesting to you what crazy things other companies are doing.

Four-day week

Workations

Bahncard 100 for everyone...

Perhaps you also scroll through this sometimes a bit dejected and think: "Why isn't this possible with us?"

The good news is:

Corporate culture develops with a goal-oriented strategy and grows through it.

The culture becomes stronger and clearer through a clear approach. And this clear approach means nothing less than that you are working according to a strategy. You can tell by the fact that you are not running around in circles screaming, you don't lock yourself away in your office and you don't have a 60 hour week. You proceed in a coordinated, planned manner and with a goal in mind.What distinguishes a good HR strategy for my company?