At this stage of the year, HR leaders should be moving out of crisis response mode during the pandemic and assessing how to best position talent to support the company moving forward.
After navigating issues related to layoffs, furloughs, and pay cuts, it’s time to review whether the HR strategy still aligns with your company’s business objectives and plans. This is especially critical if your company has implemented a new strategy to adapt to changes in your industry or market.
These conditions are ideal to bring in an outside HR expert to help you strategize and plan for a potential new workforce in support of the new company objectives. By utilizing HR as a service, you have the advantage of an objective third party to help you devise a plan. Furthermore, by utilizing HR as a service, you will be positioned to develop an agile workforce that is engaged in the new direction of the company.
Why Reviewing Strategy is Important Now and Not Later
When your company establishes new objectives and an overall new strategy, HR’s objectives and strategy should also follow suit. You should think broadly about ensuring that your roster is optimized to execute the strategy. No longer are you piecing together a few changes. Now you need to proactively review the impact of the new strategy on your talent roster. What should you focus on?
- Take a deep dive into the strategy change.
- Analyze your current talent resources.
- Evaluate gaps in current talent vs. needed talent.
- Identify top performers to retain and incentivize, plus identify high-potentials.
- Formulate new/revised compensation and benefits packages to address reward and retention goals for the new workforce.
Developing the right response will require tremendous effort, energy, and time. That’s why bringing in an HR consultant to provide leadership and expertise can help expedite and complete the process. This way, your company will be able to gain speed executing the new strategy. Consider how HR as a service can support each of these areas to create agility.
1. Review the Strategy Change
A new strategy comes with ancillary changes that need to be carefully considered. You may need to focus on business operations alignment or even compliance issues.
For example, you need to stand up an entirely new department to support new business operations. Or, there are new compliance issues that need to be navigated in support of introducing your product or service to a new market.
- HR as a Service: Consult with an HR expert on these critical issues to walk through what is necessary from a talent perspective to ensure you have the appropriate staff and resources to support the corresponding changes. Additionally, an outside HR consultant may be able to provide insight and objectiveness to support decision-making.
2. Analyze Current Talent Resources
Teams may need to change. Roles may need to change. Department structures may need to change. You may need to re-organize the entire workforce to align with the new strategy.
The question is how to strategically approach talent re-alignment without creating headaches for the company. The answer is thinking bigger about how to leverage the skillset, experience, and traits of your people in new roles.
- HR as a Service: An outside HR expert can help you look beyond how the workforce was previously arranged and provide necessary expertise on how teams should look to support the new strategy. It may be a situation in which organizational re-design becomes necessary. The process is to review the roles that are needed to support the new strategy -- including permanent and temporary roles -- and then assess if you currently have this talent. Then, you can ask critical questions. Can you deploy people elsewhere? Do you need to hire outside talent, develop new talent, or both? The answers will help reveal whether you need to fill gaps in your workforce.
3. Evaluate Gaps on the Talent Roster
After identifying gaps in the organizational chart, it’s worth taking time to perform a comparative analysis that will help identify the talent that is needed to support the new direction.
You want to continue thinking strategically when stepping into talent recruitment to fill roles. For example, before the pandemic, your talent pool may have been limited by geography. Now, you may be able to fill key roles with talent from around the globe, creating a larger pool of qualified candidates and greatly decreasing the time it may take to fill a job.
- HR as a Service: Outsourcing talent acquisition and recruitment will help alleviate tactical steps in the process so that you can focus on more important matters. Then, when the pool of candidates is narrowed down, you can re-enter the process to review and approve candidates to interview with your company’s key staff/management team.
4. Identify Top Performers to Reward and Retain
Simultaneous to recruiting new talent for your workforce, you should also be thinking about how to retain and incentivize your current top performers. High-performing executives, managers, and individual contributors will be critical to helping move the company forward in support of the new strategy.
Plus, you should also pay special attention to high-potential employees who could fit into key roles in the new organizational chart. It’s important to differentiate between current top performers and your high-potential people. They are usually the same, but not always.
For example, a highly technical employee may excel at their job and classify as a “high performer,” but this individual may not have the desire or greatest potential to be promoted into a management or leadership role. Be careful not to make this mistake.
After performing this assessment, you should then think about how to retain and incentivize these individuals accordingly. HR leaders often fall back on financial compensation as the only method to support retention. However, there are many other options -- some of which have become more accepted in the wake of COVID-19, such as the ability to work from home, flexible work schedules, more mentorship opportunities, training and up-skilling courses, and other benefits.
- HR as a Service: An HR consultant can help you take a step back to look at the big picture before jumping at one approach to retain employees. Go back to the objectives, review the strategy, analyze the workforce, and think through opportunities to support each employee in a way that motivates them to perform at a high level.
- An HR consultant can also help with implementing a methodical process to assess and evaluate skills and individual talent profiles. This intentional process will help guide the direction of the workforce planning and talent acquisition plan.
5. Formulate New Compensation & Benefits Packages
Financial compensation may not be the only piece of the puzzle to support retention and to attract new talent, but it is a key driver. HR leaders need to ensure that new or revised compensation and benefits packages are aligned with the company’s strategy and that your company remains competitive in the talent marketplace.
You can build an entirely new workforce to align with the changes, but if you cannot retain or attract talent with competitive financial compensation, your company will quickly lose agility from not having the right talent at the right time to support the new direction. There is tremendous value in retention to help your company avoid costly turnover and impact employee morale. This helps with both the financial cost of unwanted turnover and the time cost of losing momentum.
- HR as a Service: An HR expert can help you review compensation and benefits for executives, key leadership, future talent, and high-potential talent in the company. Additionally, you can leverage expertise to build out a talent profile for each role, create a talent pipeline to attract more quality talent, and think through succession planning to maintain an agile workforce.
- HR outsourced service can also include drafting or revising job descriptions, benchmarking jobs, and building or restructuring job architecture and pay structures to ensure both internal and external equity.
- An outsourced HR consultant can also help with creating and managing the process to administer bonus calculations and payments, performance management, merit increased, and equity grants.
Communicate Changes to Executives and Stakeholders
After making decisions about how to optimize your workforce to support the new strategy, the next most important step is effective communication to executives and affected individuals.
The C-Suite needs to feel confident that you have understood the change in direction and have developed the ideal labor force to align with the new objectives and strategy. Meanwhile, managers and individual contributors need to understand why things are changing and what their new role is supporting the change in direction.
This situation requires a flexible approach to communicate the appropriate information to each level of the organization. Working with an HR expert can help you craft the ideal communication to each affected party in a manner that moves the company forward in the same direction.
Engage with an HR as a Service Partner to Support Change
An outside perspective is often the ideal method to align HR and business strategy, especially if time and internal skills are lacking in your organization, or if your staff is stretched thin due to competing priorities.
When engaging with an HR as a Service partner to help facilitate change in your company, you can expect to receive the following support:
- Expert advice and an objective assessment to help plan the path forward.
- Insight beyond what you have already thought about or considered.
- Consistent support to launch or execute changes.
- Tactical planning, program management, and project management.
- Access to key staff to support HR issues if your organization lacks the current skill set or is focused on other priorities.
- Keen insight to anticipate things that veer off the path and plan for those contingencies.
Then, once your company’s HR processes are defined and stabilized, you have the opportunity to look into the option of outsourcing transactional business processes.
NB Business Solutions is capable of filling this need. Our CEO and HR principal Tam Nguyen can help your company bridge the HR gap when implementing a new strategy. Armed with 20+ years of experience and knowledge, Tam will help your organization advance past the pandemic and think strategically about how to maximize the capabilities of your talent roster. Consider embedding a qualified HR as a Service partner in your organization to support your new HR strategy. Contact NB Business Solutions today for support with human capital leadership and strategy.