HR Strategies

Organizations can benefit tremendously from implementing strong HR strategies. Establishing a strategic focus on staffing will produce candidates who are successful in their jobs resulting in higher productivity levels for the organization. HR strategies also ensure effective performance management development, and encourage employee involvement in the goal-setting and measurement processes.

HR forecasting is used to identify long-term staffing and development needed to support business strategies, which in turn allows the organization to acquire the new skills and competencies needed to support changes in the business strategy. Employees will also benefit tremendously from effective HR strategies as individuals will have a clear picture of how they are doing in relation to their goals throughout the year and are provided with information and guidance to improve their performance. But most importantly, work efforts are recognized and people are rewarded accordingly for their labors.

The single most important function of HR is to ensure a competitive advantage through people. For any organization, strategic alignment is a key factor in achieving its business goals. All HR strategic efforts should be measured in their facility toward realizing one or more of the following:

• Ability to effect the bottom line
• Ability to implement business strategies, and/or:
• The power to positively and directly impact employee performance

EMEND works in partnership with the clients to develop sound HR strategies by:

1. Translating the business strategy into “people terms” and examining how the role of people shapes the success of the organization.
2. Examining and assessing how current HR programs support business objectives.
3. Focusing on HR activities and programs in areas that will have the most impact on achieving business objectives such as:
4. Compensation and Rewards
5. Recruitment and Selection
6. Training and Development
7. Performance Management
8. Communications and Change Management and;
9. Behavioral Change Management and Measurement

Today, more than ever, an organization’s success is dependent on its people. This is why a committed investment in an organization’s employees supersedes any other investment – they are the most important variable in their organizations’ success. Effective HR strategies will attract highly talented human capital, ensure employee retention, and effectively help an organization meet its business goals and vision.

Compensation Strategies

Compensation plays an important role in today’s incentive driven organizations. It reinforces desired organizational culture and values, while focusing on employees. A compensation strategy will encompass the overall pattern of policy decisions, which affect an organization’s success. There are four basic categories of policy decisions, and clients need to establish a strategic position on each:

• Internal Consistency:  This category involves comparisons among jobs or skills. The emphasis is on assessing job content and evaluating relative contribution of work to organizational success
• External Competitiveness:  This category involves looking at how an employer positions its pay relative to what competitors are paying. The emphasis is on pay mix – variable over fixed costs.
• Employee Contributions: This category involves the organization’s position on the employee’s contribution. The emphasis is on paying for tenure vs. performance.
• Administration: This category speaks to proper management of the system to ensure the best results. The emphasis is control over flexibility.

There a number of perspectives on compensation strategies including:

• Reflecting the organization’s strategies: What do we want to get for our money?
• Supporting the business strategy
• Ensuring consistency: How should different levels of work be paid?
• Strengthening competitiveness
• Valuing employee contributions
• Assessing administration and implementing techniques that will translate strategi policy into practice.
• Recognizing and allowing for “fit” environmental and regulatory pressures to shape the environment as well as be shaped by it.
• Reflecting the organization’s culture and values
• Meeting employee needs with flexible compensation systems
• Understanding unions and that pay systems need to be able to adapt to the nature of union management
• Acknowledging global competition

Compensation strategies are one of the few organizational systems that touch each and every employee. Reward plans can either encourage or discourage employee commitment to the organization’s goals and priorities. Each organization is unique and there exist endless options available for using pay to align performance with strategy.

EMEND Management Consulting Inc. works with each client to provide such a unique strategy that fits their needs best. EMEND works in partnership with clients to:

1. Build the business case.
2. Produce a draft strategy: establish the project team, resources, champions needed.
3. Develop the strategy (including pilot testing) and seek its approval.
4. Assess existing programs, processes and collective agreements to determine how well they fit with the new strategy.
5. Design and/or mold each program to fit the compensation strategy.
6. Maintain, modify and update the strategy as needed to ensure alignment with business objectives.

Trying to decide which organization you want to service your business needs, proves to be an intricate task. Such questions as what are the organization’s credentials? What kinds of people run the company? How do they treat their clients? And how well a job they do, all not only need to be answered, but also validated.

EMEND believes that such validation can only come from the high performance of our clients.