HR Innovation, HR Management, HR Strategy

3 HR Strategy Ideas to Plan for in 2023

As you prepare for 2023 and find yourself in the throes of planning to determine the strategy and budget to successfully carry out your initiatives, are you incorporating HR into your process?

What top HR initiatives do you need to focus on that will keep your team engaged and productive to yield a successful new year? While certainly that is subjective to each organization’s needs and outlook, here are our recommendations for a successful 2023.

1.     Improve the Employee Experience

By now, we are sure you’ve read all about The Great Resignation, Quiet Quitting, and Silent Firing. What is the main objective that could prevent all of this? It’s the employee experience. When developing and strengthening a “people-centric” company, leaders need to make the employee experience a priority by creating impactful connections with employees and providing purpose-driven work. Companies with engaged workforces simply outperform companies with disengaged employees.

So, what is the result of a great employee experience?

• Engaged employees are more productive; miss less work; and have fewer safety accidents.
• Engaged employees provide better and more creative work.
• Engaged employees give better client experiences.

Ask yourself the following questions to determine if you are providing a great employee experience?

• Do I have a good culture?

  • What is that “secret sauce” to great companies? It’s the culture. What makes companies fail? More than likely, that’s also culture. A culture that encourages engagement, creativity, purpose, and trust can better deal with organizational and environmental changes. A culture that won’t change because “this is how we’ve always done it” or that still views employees as commodities is not likely to adeptly navigate the changing workforce.

• Are you paying competitively?

  • Culture is critical; however, employees need to be paid appropriately. The more talented a workforce is, the better services or products a company will provide and the more successful a company will be. This talent comes at a price and a clear approach to compensation and benefits helps to make sure the needs of everyone are met. A well-developed compensation package will attract and retain the best talent.

• What is the wellbeing of my workforce?

  • Since the pandemic, we are all working differently. A focus on (and a demand for) employee wellbeing is a big part of what everyone is doing differently. This is not only the “work / life balance” that has been discussed for years, but also focuses on the overall “psychological safety” for employees. Creating an environment in which employees feel safe to share their concerns and needs as well as their ideas is critical to:
    • Employee engagement (that employee experience we’ve already discussed)
    • Inclusion
    • Creativity
    • Employees who are advocates of the organization
    • Better performance

To be successful going into 2023, it’s critical for businesses to recognize that they must have a great employee experience – if they don’t, someone else will.

2.     Build Effective Leaders and Managers

Many organizations have employees in management who know how to do their job well. Few have management who know how to manage well, let alone lead. Upskilling your management force to fill in skills gaps is critical and will lead to the great employee experience, increased productivity, the attraction and retention of great employees, and successful change management. CEOs who have invested in workforce upskilling say they have increased productivity, attracted, and retained talent and built resilience. The case for upskilling lies in four areas: business strategy, employee engagement, productivity, and a growth mindset.

What is Upskilling? This is more than skills training for a specific task. It’s giving your employees the opportunity to develop skills they can use the rest of their management career. These might be “soft skills” such as conflict resolution or providing great feedback, or technical skills required to bring them to the next level.

Great leadership and management are critical to your organization. We’ve all heard the very true adage that employees leave managers, not tasks. Training your managers to support a great employee experience will yield higher commitment from your employees, as well as higher levels of engagement and higher trust.

3.      Is Your Workforce Structure Efficient?

While the pandemic may be settling down and permitting employees to get back into the workplace, all trends indicate that what we are entering into is a new version of that old workplace; organizations and employees are not going back to exactly where things were before the pandemic. Companies have learned new ways of doing business, and employees have learned new ways of getting their jobs done while having better life balance.

Rather than being in that temporary mindset during the pandemic, organizations need to look at applying what they learned and went well to a long-term strategy. There is no “one size fits all” structure for this, and employers need to be intentional about what this looks like rather than letting things organically change into something that does not meet their needs.

All of this is a lot to consider for 2023, but it’s also a very exciting time to plan for how your organization can be high engagement and offer a great experience to employees. HR Affiliates would love to help you with this, and help your organization go from “getting by” to “getting it done right.”