Your company’s greatest strength lies not in the amount of money you have in your bank account or the number of clients you’re able to claim. While both of these are vital to your success, the only way to gain clients and revenue and continue growing them is to have a great team of employees. Your human capital is truly the wealth of any organization, and putting a system into place of strategic human capital management is essential to the continued success of your business. There are ten key principles of human capital management. It’s important that you have a plan in place for all ten to capitalize on the strengths of your team and ensure you are providing them with the best work environment.
Key Principles of Strategic Human Capital Management
As the workforce continues its inevitable shift toward a more mobile and flexible environment, human capital management must also make a shift. Utilizing technology to build an effective, efficient, and user-friendly HR program is an excellent way to make sure you are keeping up with the times and maximizing your time and budget. Below are the ten key principles of strategic human capital management and tips on how you can utilize technology to achieve each one, while improving the experience of your mobile workforce.
Workforce Planning
Workforce planning is the continual process of aligning the needs and priorities of your organization with those of your workforce in order to meet goals and objectives as well as regulatory requirements. With a growing focus on the need for a mobile workforce, HR managers must have a plan in place that allows for remote workers to have just as much access to resources as those who are based in the home office.
Having tools that allow them to track time and progress on projects, as well as communicate with all pertinent colleagues or managers, will help ensure a streamlined workflow. An effective system will also allow you to build an inclusive culture for contingency workers.
Competency Management
It can be difficult to keep track of the performance of all of your employees, especially if many of them rarely come into the office. A competency management program allows your HR team to collect observable skills, behaviors, and attitudes that impact the work your people do. Not only will it allow you to track this, but it will also help you put roadmaps in place to help your team increase their productivity and job satisfaction.
With project management tools, easy access to training and collaborative meetings, and instant communication, you can ensure you are not only observing how your team is operating as a whole, but also set expectations and help your workers exceed them.
Performance Management
How do you and your HR team plan, monitor, and review an employee’s work objectives and goals? How do you help them increase their overall contribution to the team’s success? Do you do so effectively with both in-office employees and remote team members?
Performance management across the board is critical to the success of your business. An effective system will allow you to identify and assist under-performers, reward high producers, and always have a good idea of where your company stands and how to get to the next level.
Compensation Planning and Strategy
If your HR team is trying to schedule, track, and compensate a large workforce with varying skill levels, pay grades, and specialties, they may be wasting hours of the company’s time by trying to do so without proper tools. An online system that helps them perform compensation planning and strategy will promote fairness and consistency in their policies while ensuring that all employees are paid based on industry standards and other factors that are in their compensation agreement.
With features such as shift scheduling, time tracking, project management, and schedule management accessible right from their personal smart devices, the proper system will save your entire organization time and money.
Time and Expense Management
Managing the hours worked by your team and the expenses involved in travel, overtime, unnecessary hours worked, and supplies is vital to your overall bottom line. The easier you can make time tracking and schedule management for your team, the more accurate and accountable they will become. By offering your HR team benefits such as employee rostering software and instant access to employee schedules, you can help them do their jobs more efficiently.
Learning
Education and training are of the utmost importance to your organization, but it can be difficult to offer these resources to remote employees. Create training materials that are readily available on the web can help expand the skill set and knowledge base of your entire workforce. Employees can access them anywhere or anytime that works best for them, encouraging them to take part in continuous education when it fits into their schedules.
Recruitment
Your company’s recruitment efforts will begin targeting more millennials as they enter the workforce in record numbers. To get this younger generation of workers on board, you’ll need to offer flexible, mobile work options as millennials want to work when they want and from where they want.
When you have the proper tools in place, not only will you be able to attract these new team members, but you’ll also be able to engage them and provide them with the type of environment they need to be productive.
Onboarding
Onboarding new employees in a consistent and effective manner is essential to your human capital management strategy. Creating web-based onboarding training and resources allows all of your employees to have access to a consistent set of regulations and expectations that can be viewed at any time.
Contingent Workforce Management
Your contingent workforce consists of independent contractors, temporary workers, freelancers, consultants, and remote workers, and it’s likely that it will continue to grow as technology improves. It’s important to build an inclusive culture for contingent workers that offers the same resources, levels of communication, and benefits as your other team members.
Tools that allow for shift scheduling, project management, and online training will help them feel like part of the team and overall vision of the company.
Organization Visualization
Seeing your company as a whole is an important step to effectively managing your team as well as planning for the future. The proper planning tools can help you bring everything into focus in one easy-to-use platform, allowing you to make adjustments, create goals, and properly manage your business as it grows and evolves.
A strategic human capital management plan will mean the difference between failure and success for your company. Utilize a system that allows you to put the ten above strategic principles into place and you will set your business up for capitalizing on the future.
