HR Strategy
The definition of “Strategy” is “A plan which will gain advantage….”, so an HR Strategy should be something the delivery of which will ‘gain an advantage’. What are the key challenges facing the organisation in the period ahead? What moves associated with HR / Organisation Development / Workforce could give that advantage?
Browsing around these pages, you will pick up the key themes that a Strategy should cover - explicit Values, clear Mission, etc, and the key to it all is the careful selection and devlopment of the team leaders.
It really doesn't matter how good the words on the paper are if the team leaders fail to convince everyone all day every day - and that cannot just be parrot fashion, you have to make the whole strategy so good that they will actually want to promote it.
Think about 'hard' and 'soft' - features such as the pay structure, the suite of policies, the actual arrangement of jobs into a structure - all help to define the 'hard' framework of the organisation - and all of those can be changed (unless you work in a huge public sector organisation), but then there are the 'soft features - what is the ideal culture the organisation needs? How can you stimulate behaviours that will deliver that? Remember that people's experience of their day at work is shaped by your HR strategy.
SO - that means that the good HR Strategies show everyone how they will benefit from making it work.
There is a blending task - the Strategy must be aspirational, and so that will be beyond the current experience of the people in the workforce - it is where the HR professionals would want to go. But, it must be real, grounded, and addressing things that the workforce recognise, and so must be based on some sort of systematic assessment of where we are now, and finally, as the draft emerges, take a sense check - discuss it with people who will be affected and who will be involved in its delivery, and make changes to help them.