134 | Creating an HR strategy: how to get started when you’re feeling stuck

Welcome back to HR Coffee Time.

It's wonderful to have you listening today.

I'm your host, Faye Wallace, a career and leadership coach for HR and people professionals, and I've made HR coffee time especially for you to help you have a successful and fulfilling HR or people career.

If you've been listening to the show for a while, you may have noticed there are quite a few episodes about strategy and being strategic.

In fact, I now have a whole playlist of episodes for you about this if it's a topic that you want to take a deep dive into, if you haven't come across podcast playlists before, they just are collections of episodes.

By having them all together in one place, it makes it easier for you to find all the episodes that cover the particular topic you're interested in.

I've created 14 different playlists so far and you can find them all on my website, which is bright sky career coaching.

Just visit the Hrcoffee podcast page on there and scroll down to the bottom and you will find all of the playlists ready and waiting for you.

I'll also make sure that I pop a link to the strategy playlist for you in the show notes at the moment, I've called it operate strategically or create a powerful HR or people strategy playlist, but it's not a very catchy title, so I might have a think about renaming it in the future.

But whatever point you come to it, all of the episodes will still be the same on there.

It just might have a slightly more impressive title.

The reason I've covered strategy and being strategic quite a few times, and in a lot of different ways is because I know it's something that can feel really daunting.

There are so many articles and social media posts online saying that HR and people professionals need to be strategic, but there doesn't seem to be a lot of advice out there on how to do it, so I know it's something you might be worrying about, and that's why today's episode is all about how to get started when you're feeling stuck.

Because I know how daunting it can be to look at a blank page and have absolutely no idea where to start or to feel that your mind has gone completely blank.

Instead of being full of ideas, I really hope you're going to enjoy the episode and find it useful.

Let's dive into the main part of the show now.

In episode 108 of the podcast, we heard from Doctor Max McEwin, who is the author of the brilliant book the Strategy book.

It is well worth a read if it's not already made its way onto your bookshelf.

And Max reassured us in that episode that we're all strategic, even if we feel like we aren't, or that we worry we just can't do strategy.

He pointed out that strategy is about making a plan to achieve something that we want for the future.

So if you've ever arranged a party or booked a holiday, you have got evidence straight away that you're being strategic already.

If we think about that holiday example for a moment, this means that you've probably taken action in the past by researching different holiday destinations, looking up different holiday packages and flights, saving up for the holiday, booking the holiday, planning some things you'd like to do while you're on that holiday, and then eventually you got to go on the holiday and hopefully you had a wonderful time.

So in that example, you were being strategic, you had a strategy, you had a plan, there were steps you had to go through, and then you got to where you wanted to be.

So if we think about this now, from an HR perspective, creating an HR or people strategy is all about identifying what you want your HR or people function to achieve for the organization you work in for the future, what do you want it to achieve for the future?

I hope that gives you a little confidence boost to know that you are already strategic and you can create strategies.

But I know that you might then be worrying about the next steps.

Because since creating that episode, I've had some people say to me, okay, Faye, I've got it.

I know I need to come up with a plan to achieve something in the future, but I have absolutely no idea what that future should be or could be, or where to start.

In episode 102, which is called boosting your strategic knowledge to step up in your HR role, I shared some of the key insights from Richard Rommelt's book, good Strategy, Bad Strategy, the difference and why it matters.

The main thing that had really struck me when I read that book was that to have a good strategy, you need to have identified the biggest problem the organization has to solve and then focus all your efforts on that instead of trying to tackle lots and lots of different things at once.

But again, I know that reading that or hearing that can make a lot of sense.

But when you then have to sit down and come up with a strategy, it can feel a bit daunting.

You might be asking yourself, well, what is the biggest problem the organization is trying to solve?

How do I know where to start?

And how does HR strategy tie into that?

So here's where I think two key steps come in that can be really helpful.

The first step is finding out what the overarching strategy for the whole organization is.

If you're not on the board or you're not directly responsible for coming up with the whole strategy, you may not know what it is, but if you do know what it is, your first step is to take a look at it and then figure out how, as an HR function, you can help it to be successful.

If you don't know what the organisation's main strategy is because the senior leadership team are being really slow at coming up with it, or you work in a smaller organisation where there has never been a formal strategy and they don't seem to have any intention of coming up with one soon.

You can start off by asking some key questions of senior leadership to find out what their plans are for the future, to find out what are those problems they're trying to overcome that Richard Rumelt taught about?

Are they looking at expansion and growth for the company, or do they want to keep everything pretty much the same as it is now, but optimize everything that's already in place?

Do they want the organisation to become more innovative because their main competitor is snapping up all their customers with their more advanced products?

Do they need to shrink the organization slightly, or shrink it a lot because they realise they got carried away after receiving funding and hired more people than they really needed?

Are they thinking of splitting the organization into separate entities?

The different possibilities for where they want the organization to be in the future are almost endless, even if you can't pin them down to hand you over a strategy that is written down for you to work on, you can hopefully get them to explain their ideas to you in a conversation.

Once you know their thoughts and their intentions for the organization, you can get to work with coming up with ideas for your HR or people strategy, and I have some resources in my essential HR planner to help get your ideas flowing.

The planner always covers a whole calendar year starting from January to December.

I was so disappointed because apparently the name was too generic, so I asked for ideas for the new name on social media and in my free weekly HR coffee time email newsletter and I was so grateful to have an amazing response from everyone.

If you're one of the people who helped me come up with a new name, thank you so much.

I really, really appreciate your input.

Hooray.

I've been working on it for months and months, so I'm really relieved to have finalized it and I'm hoping to be able to have it available for sale very soon.

There are two pages in it that will be particularly helpful with creating an HR strategy, and I'll talk you through what's in them now in case you're listening to this in the future and you have a copy of the essential HR planner in front of you.

The pages that I'm going to refer to now are part of the section that is titled key HR areas of influence you'd like to focus on, and these pages can be useful at helping you pin down your goals and plans for the year, even if you're not responsible for the strategy.

But let's talk about them now, assuming that you are responsible for the HR strategy.

The second page has a list of all the different areas within an organisation that are usually seen as being fully or partially looked after by the HR or people team.

I won't read through all the words on the list because it will be boring to have to listen to me read out a whole long list, but I will share a few just to give you an idea of what I mean.

Some of the words on there are benefits and rewards, culture, employer branding, employee value proposition, equity, diversity and inclusion, induction and onboarding, learning and development, management development and support, redundancies, talent acquisition and well being.

It's my hope that by hearing me read through those, or you reading them through yourself in your essential HR planner, that you might be thinking, hmm, now I know what the main strategy is for the organization.

Which of these areas could the HR or people function be focusing on and improving, refining or changing to help that overarching strategy succeed?

So, for example, if you know that the plans for the organization that their organisation's overarching strategy is for rapid expansion, part of your HR strategy might involve looking closely at your talent acquisition and recruitment methods and processes and thinking.

Are they going to be able to cope?

Am I going to have to make some changes as an organization or as an HR function?

What are we going to have to change and do?

You might also be wondering, is the employer brand strong enough to easily entice people to apply to work at your organization?

And is it strong enough so they're going to want to say yes when they're offered a role?

Or should part of your strategy be about strengthening it?

Thinking of a different example if the organisational strategy is to become more innovative, what can the HR or people function be doing to enable that?

Will it be helpful to deliver specific learning and development programmes?

Can rewards and recognition be introduced to acknowledge and reward innovative behaviour?

Will the culture have to evolve to ensure that people feel safe and supported challenging existing ideas and introducing new ones?

Hopefully hearing me talk through these two different situations is already sparking some ideas for you.

If you've been staring at a blank page where your HR strategy is supposed to be, I hope that you're already starting to feel like you have something to start writing.

I'll quickly share the other thing that is on the second page of that part of the essential HR planner.

It's a simple drawing of a winding road with the figure of a person standing on it.

The road represents the employee life cycle and there are nine labels on the road starting at the beginning of it, working their way along it.

And the 9th label is at the very end of the road.

The labels number one, attraction number two, recruitment number three, onboarding number four, development number, life events number six, retention number seven, reward number eight, separation and number nine, alumni.

So you can see straight away there's a strong overlap with the list of words that make up the key HR areas of influence that I read out to you earlier, but their sentiment behind these is slightly different.

By having the employee lifecycle mapped out, I'm hoping it helps you think about which parts of the life cycle can be focused on to help.

Not only everyone working at the organisation have a fantastic experience and contribute brilliantly via their work, but also think about how can lasering in on improving one of these aspects help the overarching strategy to succeed?

We're coming to the end of the episode now, so I thought I would wrap up by quickly recapping the key points that I covered today.

I started off by talking about the fact that I know creating an HR strategy can feel daunting, but I hope you now feel encouraged because you remember that you're already strategic in your everyday life.

You can absolutely do this.

We then moved on to looking at the fact that the key to getting started with your HR strategy is to identify what you want your HR or people function to achieve for your organization in the future.

So how is the HR or people function going to help the organisation achieve its goals?

And to do that, it's really helpful to understand, or crucial really to understand what the organisation's overall strategy is.

And if that's not clear, try having some conversations with senior leadership about their future plans so you can find out.

Then I talked you through two of the activities that are in the essential HR planner to help spark some ideas for you.

We looked at the key HR areas of influence and the employee lifecycle to see where you can start to make a really big impact and figure out how your HR strategy can tie into the organisation's overall strategy.

I really hope that this episode has given you some practical starting points and a confidence boost for creating your HR strategy.

I'd love to hear how you get on if you decide to put any of the ideas in this episode into action, you can always reach me on LinkedIn.

I'm on there as Fayewallis.

That's Faye without an e on the end and Wallis is spelt with an is on the end.

And before I say goodbye, can I possibly ask you for a small favourite?

If you've been enjoying HR coffee time, I would be hugely grateful if you'd consider leaving a rating or a review for it in whichever podcast app you're listening to the show in now.

Ratings and reviews make such a big difference in helping the show to reach more people, and I would just love to help as many HR and people professionals as I can with this free podcast.

Thank you so much.

Have a great rest of your day or rest of your evening, depending on when you're listening to this, and I'm looking forward to being back again soon with the next episode for.