Human capital and intellectual properties are the most important assets of organization. Large field would be nothing without people to cultivate it. High tech equipment is weapon but without the operator, it would be useless. Huge fund is vital to build business but without people to manage the money, it would be wasted. For that reason, human capital strategy takes a big portion on the growth of the company.
Read excellent article about Best HR Management Training.
Human capital or people strategy should be built by seeing all elements carefully. Organization condition, human resources condition, organization objective, economic condition, and regulation environment should be analyzed deeply. No one could be passed because everything plays part in creating the best strategy.
Organization condition becomes the first to see because this is the starting point of the work. HR needs to see the weakness of the organization as well as the strong points. HR should find a way to solve the weakness problem and optimize the strong points.
As strategy for human capital, human resources condition is everything. Current condition should be analyzed profoundly in order to find problems and potential. The goal of the strategy should be made by determining how the human resources would be in the future.
Organization objective will influence the strategy because strategy is made to help organization reach the objective. The strategy should come along with organization objective. Nevertheless, the objective should be realistic or no strategy could make it.
Economic condition will influence how the organization will run. When the economy turns bad, organization will struggle but strategy could overcome it. When economy turns good it would help but the result would be depend on the strategy.
The next important factor should be regulation environment that will influence the steps to take. Every decision and every step should follow regulation strictly. Nothing should go beyond regulation. To combat regulation is bad action because it would be suicidal.
In creating strategy, everything should come in balance. Workforce energy that containing values, engagement, and culture should scaled in the right way. Cost, performance, and risk that become the most important parts in economy should be calculated well without any mistake. Besides balancing, all elements should be integrated in full. That would make the greatest impact to the organization.
In order to make the strategy work well, the essential thing to do is dealing with problems. Although organization could make great strategy to improve performance, if the problems remain, it would become the obstacle to reach the goal. A little hole in the fabric will get bigger overtime if you do not close it immediately.
The common problem in human resources management is critical skills gap between workers, especially between new and old. Training and education are believed to be the solutions for the critical gap. However, instead of do the training and education after employment, it would be better if organization do it before employment. Organization could works with schools to teach and train student in the way they want it and choose candidates.Training and education should be continued after employment in order to get rid the gap.
The next problem is lack of database of practices and talent strategies. Good HR should have integrated data of practices, talent strategies, and organization’s strategies. Using the data, HR could engage in discussion with senior executives and speak up their recommendation for the strategy.
The other common problem is about the human professionals themselves who work more as administrators, instead of become the part of the strategic partners in the business. HR professionals should change their roles and spend more times to be strategic partners in the organization. HR professionals should focus on developing strategy and help organization to execute it.
Sometime, the problem is not on the employees but on the leaders. Some leaders do not have enough knowledge about the principles of human capital decisions. The crack should be filled and all business managers should aware of the importance of human capital. HR executives must able to solve this challenge.
The problems will not stop there because the world is changing. Even a little change could make big impact to business and the talent. The worst is strategy failure. This is the reason why, human capital strategy should able to adapt to a new environment or the team should change it to fit new situation.
Regular evaluation to the strategy is needed in order to know whether the strategy is still proper for current condition. Improvement could be made when the strategy is still suitable. Nonetheless, if the evaluation states red flag, new strategy should be made.
Engaging employees could help to achieve better strategy. Some time HR executives should brave enough to change leadership, change readiness, and perform transformation. Of course, it would be very hard to be done but with focus and using data, HR could add value to the business greatly.