What is strategic HR?

Holly Jones

The administrative and compliance duties most commonly associated with HR are essential for an organization to survive. Yet, to help your company truly thrive, HR also needs to be involved at the strategic level. 

What does this mean? 

Strategic HR starts with understanding of an organization's "big picture," which may include its business and growth strategy, its ethical values, its cultural objectives, or other long-range missions. Then, just as a company's finance department will identify ways it can support these long-term goals with the monetary resources of the organization, the strategic HR professional will identify ways to support these goals with its human resources. The strategic HR professional may use data, analysis, and critical thinking to recommend recruitment initiatives, employee engagement programs, succession plans, and compensation and benefits packages that will not only serve the organization's immediate operations goals for today, but continue to do so for five, ten, and twenty years down the road.

Strategic HR professionals bring invaluable insight to an organization by expanding the HR function from a reactive one—filling job openings and avoiding lawsuits—to a proactive one. In this way HR strategists better position themselves—and the HR department—as exceptional, savvy business leaders.

Please use this forum to discuss strategic issues such as becoming a partner in the C-suite, using the HR function to achieve long-term business goals, matching resources to future needs, and guiding company culture and structure.