Solutions For Failed HR Strategies!

If you’ve been following my “HR Consultancy Wednesdays” posts for a while, then you know how to create an HR Strategic plan by now.

Many HR professionals, unfortunately, think that a well-written plan is all they need to succeed forgetting that poor execution can make your good plan seem like the worst idea that the world has ever had.

?Here are 6 key reasons that mostly cause HR strategic plans to fail. These will be shared in two parts with this being part one and part two will be shared next Wednesday.

1.?????A good idea without a plan

I’ve reviewed many HR plans for various organizations and they’re sadly full of lofty ideals like “we want our customers to love us,” “we want to be the best” and everything along those lines. Whilst these are not bad intentions, they are nothing more than just good expressions. A strategic plan should be more than that. What in the plan tells your team how they will get customers to love you and how you will get to be the best at what you do?

Solution: Have specific goals and objectives laid out with accountabilities lined up for meeting objectives with a specific timeline, and then you can expect to meet your strategic imperatives. Getting more organized and specific comes in handy. Ensure that questions like “What does it mean? How will we measure it? How will we know when we’ve met that goal?” are well answered. The key is to understand what you’re measuring and why you are measuring it.

2.????Poor Communication breakdown

Almost every company has a strategic plan and very few employees in all those companies have seen it and even worse than that, fewer employees understand it. Usually, when I speak to professionals from various walks of life, they fall under the above descriptions. ?I think you already see where the main problem is. Why do we put a lot of effort into planning what we can’t execute so well? When your employees don’t understand why they should be part of your strategic plan, don’t execute it. Ensure that at least 90% understand why they should be on board. The same is true for HR Strategic Plans. If you put an HR strategic plan together and don’t share it outside the HR function, don’t talk to your peer leaders, and don’t talk to the executive team about how the strategic plan will support the business, be rest assured that the said plan won’t work.

Solution: For the HR function to be a success, employees must be in the question, not as the icing on the cake but as the flour in the cake. If you want to meet your key objectives, it is crucial that you effectively communicate the key components of the strategic plan and the outcome which is to support each business function and the entire organization.

3.????Poor Leadership

HR is an understaffed department in most organizations and the biggest tasks for the Function are administration tasks which consume a lot of their time giving them little or no time to do their actual work. If your organization has the top management getting involved in every aspect of the business including small tasks like picking the most suitable coffee machine, then that is poor leadership. If you want to save time, emotions, and resources, then do what you do best and outsource the rest. A wise person once said that the only way to get things done as a leader is to get them done through other people. Gone are the days when people used to say that the only way to do things right is by doing them yourself. That approach doesn’t work in today’s business environment.

Solution: Delegate some responsibilities to others in the organization even though they are outside of HR because failure to do so is failing at leadership. If your boss requires you to do it all by yourself, it is your duty to educate them. Perhaps they genuinely don’t understand the repercussion of such actions or maybe they just suck at leadership. And because you don’t know, you can only tell after giving it a try with the intention of being successful at it.?

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