Turning the way you work into your organisation’s competitive advantage

In a world that is constantly changing, how is your business remaining built for growth? For many organisations, that relies on maintaining the momentum of, or allowing for, HR strategy’s continued growth.

 

What does it mean to have an HR strategy? 

 

An HR strategy helps determine how reflexive your organisation is to change. It accounts for where people work, how they work and what they work on. Aligned with your company’s overall vision, an HR strategy is truly a key lever for growth.

 

That’s because your HR strategy is designed to make the most of your most important asset: your people. While it should be aligned with your business goals, it should be designed to meet those goals by leveraging your investment in people.

 

Let me give a quick example. An organisation’s overall goal may be to maintain a higher level of data hygiene and accessibility of reports. Your HR strategy will look for ways to train and increase your team’s data literacy to exponentially increase your data hygiene.

 

How can you turn HR into a competitive advantage? 

 

The way we work remains a bit of a fraught topic. Whether bogged down by contracts, legacy projects or manual processes, there are still so many companies whose growth is being held back simply by the way they accomplish their work.

 

In the past, HR has been seen as a primarily administrative function – mainly because HR staff have been held back by that same administrative work. Calculating entitlements, running review cycles or managing payroll, it’s a lot of cumbersome work.

 

But, with access to new tools, HR teams no longer have to be beholden to loads of admin. Instead, they can run administrative tasks in an automated fashion, and reinvest that time into strategic topics such as performance, people data and productivity.

 

What is the fastest way to unlock your HR team’s potential?

 

It starts with technology. Various technologies, particularly SaaS, have democratised the availability of HR solutions for SMEs. This is the starting point for work as a competitive edge because it allows digitised processes to replace manual ones and make way for HR strategy.

 

Essentially, we level the playing field through technology. But that does not mean that all technology is beneficial or that the solution to more growth is “more tech”.

 

In fact, it may mean less tech, done more efficiently. From my side, this all needs to begin in HR. Let me explain why.

 

How to fuel HR’s strategic growth

 

It feels like almost every year, HR and people teams are challenged in a collection of ways, whether it’s a global pandemic, a great resignation, the continued cost of living crisis or something else. 

 

And for a lot of companies, their HR teams are always up to the challenge. They build policies and initiatives, maintain corporate culture and strive to hit the same targets and goals even when times are not easy.

 

HR plans and builds business resilience in real, meaningful ways. Now, organisations need to repay the favour by allowing that momentum to continue.

 

That means allowing HR strategy, built and executed by HR teams, to facilitate work as a competitive advantage, by streamlining and introducing automation wherever possible.

 

Building toward something bigger 

 

Whether HR has a place at the executive table, or is continuing to work towards it, businesses need to give it the tools to remain part of that conversation and drive elements of it.

 

A big part of this is ensuring that HR teams have the time and the attention to devote to large-scale initiatives. Technology can help make that easier, rather than harder, by creating seamless and streamlined workflows.

 

That way, work becomes your competitive advantage by simply allowing people to realise their potential and do their best work. That starts with delivering a seamless employee experience at each stage of the employee lifecycle.

---

Personio is an all-in-one HR software that helps upgrade your people operations for now and the future. It can help recruit, hire, onboard, manage, develop and pay your employees – and much more. See how it works in practice by clicking here.