Human resources is an essential yet often overlooked part of an organization’s overall business strategy. Recruiting and retaining employees is a challenging task. If your organization isn’t approaching HR from a strategic perspective, you’ll likely fall behind the competition and lose your top talent.

Strategic human resource management (HRM) aims to better align the day-to-day activities of the HR department with a company’s long-term goals and strategy. This is particularly important in fields like behavioral health and human services that are rapidly evolving due to changes such as telehealth. Organizations need to plan ahead and strategize to continue meeting the needs of their clientele and maintain a competitive advantage.

Learn more about strategic HR management and how HR software can help your company better achieve its business goals.

What Is Strategic Human Resource Management?

Strategic human resource management links your company’s HR processes to its overall strategy and business goals. Just as you would have a marketing or sales strategy for your business, it’s important to have a human resource management strategy with measurable goals and metrics. 

Strategic HR management shifts the focus from short-term needs to long-term outcomes. HR professionals should think about how activities such as recruiting a new team member fit into the larger framework of the organization's operations and strategy. With strategic human resource management, organizations can take a more strategic approach to common HR functions. Let’s take a closer look.

Recruiting

Recruiting involves attracting, selecting, and hiring employees to fill open job positions — and it’s a highly strategic activity when managed correctly. You want to find the right talent to fit your current opening while also planning for your future needs. 

Hiring someone who’s a great fit for the company culture and has the enthusiasm and potential for growth within the company is a better long-term strategy than simply focusing on the competencies required for the current position. Strategic recruiters and HR departments know how to take a holistic and forward-thinking approach to hiring.

Onboarding

The onboarding process is a key part of any organization’s employee engagement and retention strategy. It’s an opportunity to make a great first impression with the candidate and goes beyond basic onboarding paperwork. It entails giving new hires the training and support they need to feel confident in their new roles. 

According to a Glassdoor survey, almost 30% of job seekers have left a job within the first 90 days of starting. This can indicate that the employer provided a poor onboarding experience or that the company didn’t properly assess the cultural fit when making the hire.

Benefits Administration

Offering a comprehensive and competitive benefits package is an obvious part of a company’s recruiting and employee satisfaction strategies. In a competitive labor market, a strong benefits package helps organizations stand out among other potential employers to attract top candidates. 

In addition to being important to your recruiting strategy, offering benefits also promotes employee well-being. Burnout is a huge concern across all industries, but it’s especially prevalent in behavioral health and human services. 

The American Medical Association found that nearly 50% of health workers were experiencing burnout during the pandemic and 38% reported experiencing anxiety or depression. Offering solid healthcare coverage and providing resources such as an employee assistance plan (EAP) can help your employees manage their own well-being and mental health so that they can properly support their patients or clients.

Performance Management

Performance management is another crucial part of a well-rounded HR strategy. It can be used to meet a variety of strategic goals such as improving employee performance, reducing turnover, and facilitating internal growth for employees. 

Tying individual and team performance objectives to company-wide goals is an effective way to get employees involved in larger strategic initiatives. Plus, it demonstrates how their work contributes to the overall success of the organization.

How Can Software Support Strategic Human Resource Management? 

The role of HR is to support an organization's employees. This includes handling administrative tasks such as employee data entry and benefits administration. It also includes more hands-on tasks like facilitating performance reviews and professional development activities. Without the right tools in place, a lot of your HR team’s time can be eaten up by those manual administrative tasks, leaving minimal time for the more human side of human resource management.

Unified human capital management software can optimize your HR team’s workflows to help them focus on the employee-centric aspects of their jobs. HR software can also help your organization better track its performance in regards to current strategic HR goals. 

Let’s review how an HCM platform can help your organization save time and improve its HR performance.

Streamlining Internal Communication

Internal communication is key in any company culture. It’s essential to communicate frequently with employees and loop them in on important changes, strategic initiatives, or company successes. However, managing this communication can get disorganized quickly. That’s why it helps to have a centralized platform to manage company-wide announcements. 

Communication tools such as ContinuumCloud’s “Company News” feature can help HR team members spread the word on strategic or compliance updates, client success stories, and even company happy hours. These interactive communications are a great way to cultivate a culture of transparency and connectedness.

Automating Manual Processes

Automating manual processes such as data entry or credential monitoring can help you better allocate your HR team members’ time. A unified HCM platform like ContinuumCloud can streamline your workflows by centralizing all of your HR data and eliminating the need for duplicate data entry. 

Organizations can also automate their compliance processes by setting up automated alerts when an employee’s certification or license is up for renewal. This is especially helpful for behavioral health and other licensed fields. Allowing an employee to work with an expired license can be an enormous liability, but monitoring the status of all employees can be time-consuming without automation.

Providing Business Intelligence Tools

HCM software doesn’t just save you time by automating processes and streamlining common tasks — it can also help organizations make decisions more efficiently and effectively. HCM platforms like ContinuumCloud provide HR and business leaders with rich data insights that can provide a better view of their workforce.

Workforce metrics are also helpful for tracking business performance against set goals. Managers or administrators can review the average time-to-fill for open positions to measure the efficiency of the hiring process and make adjustments to the recruiting strategy if needed. 

ContinuumCloud gives HR professionals access to a wealth of data with customizable reporting options. With detailed business analytics, leaders can use the most current data to review the success of HR initiatives such as diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts, analyze overtime and labor spending, and more. Having easy access to accurate data helps HR staff and managers improve their decision-making.

Maximizing Your Resources 

The right HCM software can help organizations allocate their resources more strategically. Features such as ContinuumCloud's Position Control are designed to help business leaders with labor cost forecasting, identifying current staffing needs, and maximizing existing resources. Leaders can easily see where employees are needed and make adjustments to meet staffing demands.

Improve Your HR Strategy With ContinuumCloud 

Take your strategic HR practices to the next level with a unified HCM platform. From personnel management to human resources to HCM, the terminology has evolved and adapted to changes in the business landscape. Your organization needs to adapt too. 

If you’re not using a unified HCM platform to optimize your people management and human resource planning processes, you’re missing out on an enormous opportunity to improve employee recruitment, engagement, and retention. 

ContinuumCloud’s HCM system is uniquely designed to meet the needs of behavioral health and human services organizations. Contact us to learn how ContinuumCloud can help your organization meet its strategic human resource management goals.