Strategic HR Putting it All Together

Strategic Human Resource Management

Human resource management has always been an important part of the organizational planning and strategy but over the past few years, its role has shifted from purely traditionalist to more strategic and hence the sudden surge in the use of the term "Strategic HRM." Strategic management of human resource is not just hogwash because the change has been important as focus shifted from laws and regulations to people. Traditionally Human resource managers like myself were mostly involved with the job of making sure that organization was complying with various rules, regulations and laws. But when the strategic alignment was introduced, we moved to more important and critical component of organization i.e. its people. By aligning people's needs with goals of the company, it was believed that we could get better results at lower costs and hence the need for integration of needs with goals was stressed.

When I was assigned the job of alignment, in other words, when I became a strategic human resource manager, I knew that now the more important component of success was not compliance with laws but satisfaction of people who worked for the organization and hence we began working on a plan that would make alignment a success. For one, aligning the needs of employees with organizational goals is not something that needs to be taken casually. Secondly, once the needs and goals have been identified, it is also important to see how the two can be aligned in a way that employees would feel empowered and important while organizational success level would improve. Our organization had been successful for some time so it was critical to show that alignment had produced a visible "improvement" in the level of productivity and performance. For this reason, we maintained some logs documenting our success over the years and periodically measuring our strategies in terms of financial gains. However the two most important documents that indicate our success in the area of strategic management of HR are a) Employee turnover report and B) financial success over the last few quarters.

Employee turnover situation:

The document chronicles the improvement in turnover situation since 2007. In 2007, we had a reasonably high turnover rate of 15% annually. Though some would say that 15% was not something to worry about, it must be noted that we are a small organization and 15% for us means thousands of wasted dollars in recruitment and training. We need to control this turnover rate in order to able to become more cost efficient and also improve employee morale and productivity. We first identified the most common reasons for an employee to leave the organization within first two years of joining. We identified the problem areas and worked on them by paying closer attention to what employees needed and how it all could be changed so employees' grievances were effectively addressed and all necessary steps were taken to make them feel important and to give them a sense of ownership in the organization. These measures worked and last year we had only a 4% turnover rate which was a major improvement and we are consistently working to maintain and even lower the existing turnover rate.