A company or any organisation is only as successful as its people. Until artificial intelligence takes over, they’re the ones who will develop and deliver your strategy and without them you’ve got nothing.
Good HR management is all about making the best possible investments in people and helping them to be as successful as possible in delivering the company’s ambitions.
There are three main elements to consider:
HR Strategy
The main elements to think of are:
- People Strategy. This is your overarching plan of what you will do to create that perfect team of people to deliver the company’s goals.
- Culture and Values. What will be our guiding principles in how we do business, what are the behaviours we will value and the ones we won’t accept, how do we want people to feel when they work with us or for us.
Broadly speaking the People Strategy is ‘what’ you will do, and your Culture and Values will influence ‘how’ you do it.
Then the elements to include in your HR best practice are:
- Leadership requirements – what priorities much each leader have and what behaviours will be most effective.
- Things that drive high levels of engagement such as a clear purpose to guide an inspire your people, your position on social and environmental issues, how inclusive you are as a business, the levels of trust that exist between leaders and colleagues and the flexibility people can have.
- Your approach to reward in terms of pay, bonuses, benefits and other forms of recognition.
- Working environments – many of which are going through a post covid revolution to reflect hybrid working, allowing for easier collaboration and flexibility, and
- Learning, a massive area that includes skill development, developing specialisations, providing career development opportunities, acquiring new talent and enabling personal development.
Operational HR
This is all the day-to-day HR activities that ensure you’re making the best and getting the best from your employees. Think about the activities that are required across the lifecycle of an employee.
- You have to attract the right people to your company, select the best ones and successfully onboard them;
- You have to give them a contract and a role that makes the best of their talents;
- You pay them and manage incentives and benefits
- They need to be supervised and managed so you need those skills in place
- You will measure their performance and help them adapt to change
- You will support their well-being and ensure they are fully included and respected
- They will need to be trained, developed and promoted through their careers; l
- Life and other unforeseen events will happen that will interrupt or affect their work and you need to be prepared to deal with all manner of different issues that arise
- The time comes for them to leave, which can happen in a variety of ways.
HR Legal Responsibility
Thirdly, this all happens in the context of a legal framework where workplace law has to be observed and risks are managed and often balanced so that you get a pragmatic outcome with managed risk. This includes:
- Having the right HR policies and practices in place
- Understanding employment rights primarily what fair treatment of employees actually means and the statutory provisions in place for things like maternity leave, flexible working requests, minimum wage and all the rest.
- Understanding discrimination law and what to have in place across policies, communication training etc is vital;
- How to support mergers and acquisitions and the implications of TUPE,
- Similarly with privacy and data protection rights
- Managing conflict at work is sometimes needed, and ideally resolving it with either informal or formal mediation using conflicts resolution skills, and if not then managing settlements and sometimes difficult exits in ways that avoid potential claims.
So good HR management is about attending to all of these things in the right measures.
If you’d like to know more, including how we can help, please get in touch.