What is the importance of a strategic framework for HR Professionals?

August 15th 2018 | Posted by phil scott

What is the importance of a strategic framework for HR Professionals?

HR Professionals are key to an organisation’s and employees wellbeing. How to motivate and get the best out of employees is at the heart of every businesses success. It is therefore vital that HR are 100% associated to the company’s purpose and vision and values so they can align their HR plans to support the business in achieving this.

All organisations can benefit from a solid, well thought out and finely tuned strategic framework.  Big, small, commercial or not for profit, the overall success of an organisation is based on the strategic framework upon which it rests.  It’s a simple equation of robust foundations leading to healthy success.

A strategic framework creates the key pillars of the organisation and the context in which it will operate.  It brings together in one place the organisation’s reason for being – its goals, ambitions, differences, achievements and its plans for the future.  Bringing together all this knowledge, insight and strategy into one place gives an organisation well-defined direction for the future and a roadmap to achieve the chosen goals.

The 5 parts of a strong strategic framework:

Those responsible for planning and creating a strategic framework will need to look at 5 key components.  All of these combined will create a robust future structure:

1 – Vision

An organisation’s vision is its big picture statement of where the organisation wants to be in the future.  It should inspire and motivate everybody that is part of it and be a vision that makes people proud to believe in and to shape.

2 – Mission

A mission statement declares and demonstrates the organisation’s purpose and what it does.  The mission statement should clearly showcase why it exists, what is it doing and what it wants to achieve.

3 – Values

An organisation is built on its core values and its essential that all stakeholders believe in these.  Values should be well defined and easy for people to understand and believe in.  Everybody in an organisation should buy-in to the chosen values and share in their meaning.

Once an organisation has identified the values it feels are most important, it can create value statements which guide it’s people on how to behave so that they can embody the values of the business.

4 – Strategies

Strategies are the broad and expansive plans that an organisation will create to bring to life its Mission, Vision and Values.  They incorporate an organisation’s key goals for the future, its extensive and visionary plans and a top-line framework of how to achieve these.

5 – Plans

The final piece of a strategic framework is the detailed action plan needed to deliver a strategy that rests on a solid mission, vision and values.

At this point in the framework, each specific, measurable and achievable goal can be broken down into actionable plans.  If the rest of the strategic planning has been followed, the plans created to achieve key business goals should naturally support the big picture strategy and feed seamlessly into the wider framework.

Why is it important to create a strategic framework?

Employees – A strategic framework is crucial for internal stakeholders as employees are the lifeblood of an organisation.  It’s essential that employees understand and believe in a company’s mission, vision and values and feel that they want to be a part of nurturing these and bringing them to life.

An organisation needs to make sure that everybody that is part of it understands why it exists and what it wants to achieve and that they share in these ambitions.  Only then will employees actively demonstrate the company values in the way they work on a day-to-day basis.  As well as this, a strong and secure mission, vision and values statement can help attract new employees into the business as they can clearly see what the organisation stands for and how they can be a part of it.

Leaders – Creating a strategic framework gives an organisation’s leadership team the ability to understand where the business is now and where it wants to be in the future.  It gives leaders the tools to identify future goals and build a road map to achieve these.   Senior management can also use the strategic framework to compare the business to where it was in the past, identifying how it has progressed and identifying significant achievements.

Competition – Creating a strategic framework, defining a mission, vision and values and exploring how to bring these to life is a crucial exercise for an organisation to define itself and identify what it stands for and what it wants to achieve.  Within competitive markets, it is these statements and concepts that will set the organisation apart from the competition, giving a business competitive advantage.

In conclusion, HR professionals can only align their plans once the company has defined what their mission and vision and values are. This will then allow the HR teams to drive and support this strategy.