What is strategic human resource management (HRM) and how can your school or academy benefit from it? We consider its place within your school’s development plan, human capital management and overall school performance
Strategic HRM does exactly what you might think; it takes a step back and considers your school’s options and possibilities for the future, as well as any potential challenges and changes that may be encountered on the journey into that future.
So, while operational HRM oversees the day-to-day operations essential to meeting the needs of your school staff, a strategic HRM plan will focus on longer-term resourcing issues. It will determine a strategic framework that sets out your HR policies and strategies – such as recruitment and employee training or rewards – matching resources to future needs as defined in your school’s development plan. A good example of this would be upskilling your reception team to become care navigators so that they can play a greater role in the care of patients – and lighten the workload elsewhere.
By working in this structured way you can ensure that the many individual HRM strategies you might wish to employ – for example, to deliver fair and equitable reward, to improve employee performance, to streamline organisational structure – work together to develop the behaviours and the performance necessary to deliver real value to your school – and thus your patients. Here are some basic strategic HRM steps to consider.
Tallying your school’s collective skill set
Assessing your school’s HR capacity – the skills, abilities and knowledge and ability to develop and innovate – should be the first step. Also known as ‘human capital’, by defining and measuring this you can better understand the human resources that you have at your disposal, harnessing this information to drive performance and improvement in your school.
How do you acquire this information? Simple; ask your staff! Do they volunteer outside of work? What is their previous employment history? Do they have any interests that they would like to develop? Further, you can use an employee’s performance assessment as an opportunity to ascertain whether they are ready, or willing, to take on more responsibility, or different responsibilities.
Understanding what’s on the horizon
Once you know what you what you have, it’s time to look to the horizon and forecast the people and the skills that you will need to deliver the wider goals of the school. As with your budget, realistic HR forecasting requires you to estimate both demand and supply. Ask yourself:
- What skills will be needed to fulfil the school’s goals?
- Do we have those skills in-house, or the potential to grow those skills in-house?
- What positions will need to be created and/or filled?
A strategic approach to HRM will take account of the potential challenges you will encounter – including external challenges such as the impact of changes in the wider health sector. For example;
- NHS funding – will this diminish, and will this impact general school?
- How will an ageing population affect demand in the school?
- What are the chances of a school merger – if one has not already taken place?
- How will the digital revolution affect how the school operates – will it alleviate workload pressures or redistribute them?
Mind the gap; identify where you are vs. where you want to be
The next part to determine is the journey; you know what you have and what you need – so how do you get there? Essentially, at this stage, you’re comparing your existing human capital and figuring out how to progress this to meet the needs of the school in the future. Does your school team have the skills required? Are they in the right position to use and improve their strengths?
Strategic HRM and the wider school strategy
Your staff – your people – are integral to the sustainability of your school, it’s growth and development; each provides knowledge and skills that support the school, so ensuring that they are valued and invested in makes sense. This makes strategic HRM critical to your school and links it inextricably with your school’s development strategy – as reflected in elements such as workforce planning.
There are five main HR strategies that will help you take your school to where it needs to be:
- Restructuring strategies – these include regrouping or redistributing tasks to create well-designed jobs (ensuring you have well-defined job specs to boot!) and reorganising staff to be more efficient, which may result in reducing staff – by termination or attrition – or, potentially, recruiting.
- Training and development strategies – providing staff with opportunities to train with the ambition of taking on new responsibilities, roles or development opportunities to hone existing skills.
- Recruitment strategies – recruiting new staff with the skills and abilities that your school will need in the future; considering ways to promote job opportunities within the school alongside ways to promote your school as a positive place to work. Retention should also be a consideration in this.
- Outsourcing strategies – where there are skill gaps that are not of value to the school to fill in-house, consider contracting a third-party service provider. For example, if undertaking a partnership review, consider engaging a consultant.
- Collaboration strategies – in primary care there are new initiatives sprouting up across the country which encourage and support collaborative working; however, in addition, there is much your school can undertake with schools in the local area by the way of collaboration such as sharing costs by training in groups, allowing staff to visit other schools to gain skills and insights. Perhaps you could band together to petition the ISBL, or other associations, to influence the courses on offer to better suit your needs.
Project implementation
All your work should be fully documented in a HR plan; this will state your objectives and resulting strategies, where the responsibility lies and the timeline by which it will be executed. Once this is in place, having the support of key stakeholders, such as you ant the SLT, governors, etc., will be essential, and you also need to ensure the wider schoolstaff is onboard and understands the reason behind it.
The bones of your plan will need to be communicated throughout the school and should cover:
- How the plan ties to the organisation’s overall strategic plan.
- What changes in HR management policies, schools and activities will be made to support the strategic plan.
- How any changes in HR management will impact on staff, including a timeframe if appropriate.
- How each individual member of staff can contribute to the plan.
- How staff will be supported through any changes.
- How the organisation will be different in the future.
It’s nearly impossible to communicate too much – but one way to ensure your message is heard is by engaging your school staff throughout the process.
With all this in mind, one final titbit of advice; HR plans need to be updated on a regular basis. To do so successfully, you will need to evaluate the success of your strategic HRM plan along the way. Set benchmarks and take the time to analyse them!
Now, good luck!
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