Strategic Human Resource Management: Benefits and Tips

Strategic human resource management—or strategic HRM or simply SHRM—is an approach to job training and development that focuses heavily on a company’s overall business strategy.

Strategic HR professionals tailor their recruiting, training, people management, and planning processes specifically to a company’s broader goals and objectives. In other words, human resource management strategies operate in tandem with a company’s mission statement.

Taking a strategic approach to human resource management can positively impact your business. Keep these three benefits in mind:

1. 1. Boosted productivity: When HR functions optimally, it shores up employees’ productivity. Training employees to carry out the specific mission of a company gives that business a competitive advantage over its rivals. Employees hit the ground running and receive support every step of the way as facilitated by their strategic HR department.
2. 2. Increased employee retention: Strategic human resource planning focuses on continual employee engagement instead of merely hiring and training new people. Similarly, strategic HR professionals do their part to ensure employees receive enticing perks and benefits packages, too. These combined elements generally lead to greater employee retention as a result.
3. 3. More calibrated workflow: When an HR department works with a company’s executive team to match their goals, it can develop an onboarding and training curriculum to make the entire company operate efficiently. With training, the department can also resolve conflicts between employees with the company's overall goals in mind.

Strategic human resource management benefits employers and employees alike. Try out these seven HR practices as a basic template for implementing a more strategic approach:

1. 1. Assess the company’s needs. Strategic HR planning keeps a company’s long-term and short-term needs in mind. HR professionals meet with other managers to find out what they need in terms of new hires and employee training to achieve departmental goals and the company’s general objectives.
2. 2. Foster a healthy company culture. Optimizing business performance is an essential aspect of strategic HR management, as is ensuring employees feel welcomed into the company culture. This means working with the executive team to craft a benefits package (featuring health care and other incentives) as well as preparing company events and providing perks to make coming to work a joy for all employees.
3. 3. Oversee onboarding. The human resource department must ingrain a company’s strategic goals into new hires as early as the onboarding process. Each new employee must feel like a necessary stakeholder as soon as they come to work. These employees must also feel well-equipped to perform all their job duties as soon as training is complete.
4. 4. Promote continual training. Employee performance relies on continual training—and HR departments help improve each worker’s skill set. This means preparing and providing training on new technology, DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusion) initiatives, and more. This furthers employees’ careers and helps to increase their value to the company.
5. 5. Recruit new employees well. Strategic HR management is responsible for finding the best employees possible for entire companies. This means aligning with a company’s core objectives to decide what competencies are necessary in staffing.
6. 6. Resolve conflicts. Any sort of workforce management team needs to know how to resolve conflicts between employees. When it comes to conflict resolution, taking an ethical, strategic approach to managing people enables you to keep everyone’s best interest in mind while still supporting the overall goals of the company.
7. 7. Return to company objectives. When it comes to forecasting future needs, strategic HR management teams can return to the mission statement and business goals of the company for which they work. These objectives provide the foundation for HR strategy and help define how to best meet a business’s needs in any given situation.

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