Your HR Strategy Should Have A Little Respect for Volumes and Frequencies - Part 1
I think HR strategy is often like throwing spaghetti against the wall to see if it sticks. We want to build a plan that is just right, delivers quality to the workforce and organization, and garners respect from our colleagues. But we aren’t really sure if our understanding of the organizational plan is correct, or if our translation of that understanding into our HR world is accurate. We are forced to build an HR strategy that seems on target but without a method to produce evidence that the strategy is yielding results. We throw it out there and hope that it sticks and produces change that can impactful enough to be measured and acknowledged.
Even our advice from HR thought leaders, strategists and think tanks is vague and unclear. The language used in articles and guides is often so full of business expertise, there is no real “how to” revealed. The advice seems to typically start from the top down – your discovery of what your organization needs from Human Resources is developed before you know what you can deliver. Perhaps the vagueness is intentional, as every organization is different. But perhaps that is also intentional so there isn’t any liability or guidance without consulting.
In my work with clients, I can confirm that every client is different. The typical consultant answer to a client or prospect’s question is – “it depends.” But that is with good reason, no one strategy fits all. Every version of strategy must be customized to YOUR organization – your needs, your capabilities, and your goals. But there are systematic processes that can be used to build your business intelligence as you start building your strategic HR Roadmap. “Insight must precede application,” stated Max Planck, the father of quantum physics, and it is our insight into the problem or need that should drive our strategy. To identify the problem, we need to conduct a little research and document what we find. And it is my view that before you ask others what they need, you need to know your capabilities to provide.
As a first step, I believe we should look internally and assess our ability to deliver on strategic initiatives. And our ability to deliver is the result of time, resources, data, and analytics – just like every other department. But we don’t typically have analytics in place that are ready-made to measure a strategic goal. It is this fuzzy math and unclear results that keeps us out of strategic discussions because to be part of the executive team, you must bring objective data to the table. To create and track objective data, our first step toward our strategy is the systematic measurements of our tools – starting at the smallest of measurements and the most straightforward – volumes and frequencies.
领英推荐
Volumes and frequencies are basic measurements like number of new hire onboarded monthly, number of payroll checks processed annually, number of training classes delivered monthly, etc. These measurements help us identify the deliverables of our operations and our capacity to produce those deliverables. Understanding our capacity is the business intelligence we are after so we can ensure we can deliver on our strategy. Without measuring our capacity for change, we embark on a strategic roadmap without sound transportation. In addition, recognizing and working to enhance our strategic capacity IS a strategic goal in and of itself.
Why are these important? Volumes and frequencies give us the context of the business processes we use in daily operations. This “current state” is the state we must maintain while we execute our HR strategy. If the bandwidth of our resources is too overloaded with volumes and frequencies, we won’t have much internal capacity to devote to our 3-5 year HR strategy. Which translates into either a higher budget for the strategy and asking for more resources or diluting and/or prioritizing our strategy to accomplish what we can with our current resources. Or alternatively – without insight into our capacity – overpromising and under-delivering.
For more insight into the “how to” of this process – using real hands-on examples – subscribe to HRPMO’s HR Strategy Implementation newsletter on Substack. It takes the LinkedIn subject above and dives deep – and you can cancel anytime. Your first newsletter is free. Just click here…