Seamless HR: How to Align HR and Business Strategies with Salesforce

The landscape for businesses has changed dramatically over the past few years. The global pandemic has shifted the way that we all work, with many employees now working remotely at least some of the time. Organisations have had to rethink their processes and strategic goals.

This shift has especially impacted Human Resources departments. While HR was once largely considered a back-office process, its role is now shifting, to keep up with the demands of attracting, retaining, and developing the best talent in the current landscape.

Yet even with the vital role HR plays in talent acquisition, onboarding, and employee experience, most organisations still exclude HR from the process of building a business strategy – expecting Human Resource departments to fall in line with strategic goals that have already been mapped out. This leaves HR playing a reactive role in strategic business processes.

But HR has a vital role to play in driving business processes forward. We are seeing this in the way that HR software has become key to digital transformation efforts, and the leading roles these departments are playing in driving employee experience and productivity.

HR teams must stop thinking in purely HR terms, with strategic goals that only effect their departments. Their thinking must be aligned to wider business processes, strategies, and goals. Businesses must understand the vital role that HR can play in supporting the wider strategy, and the investment in technology required to truly align HR processes with the wider business.

This blog will detail the many ways in which XCD, using the Salesforce platform, can make the process of aligning HR strategies and processes and business processes easier. We’ll show the benefits of not only having seamless HR and Payroll, but how the Salesforce platform can be utilised to align HR with overall business processes and goals.

The Importance of an HR Strategy

The objective of a successful HR strategy will look at human capital on multiple levels – from employee experience and engagement to understanding benefits and rewards and how they help to drive performance.

Typically, a HR strategy will cover every aspect of an employee lifecycle, from recruitment and onboarding to professional development and retention. It also should include organisational policies, compliance, and a company’s culture.

An effective HR strategy must also align at an organisational level, incorporating business resilience, growth strategies, and succession planning. Here we start to see how an HR strategy needs to overlap with that of the wider business to be successful – to go beyond thinking purely in HR terms but to see how the initiatives they are driving can shape the success of the business.

Aligning your HR strategy with the strategy of the business is crucial, because successful business strategies rely on human capital factors such as:

The Costs of Labour

For most companies, the labour costs of employees will be one of their biggest expenses. Here, HR plays a necessary role in managing these costs, whether through compensation strategies, performance management, delivering training initiatives to increase in-house expertise, and driving productivity through empowering employees.

Employer Reputation

A strong employer brand is necessary to attract the best talent. Increasingly, marketing methodologies are required to drive recruitment and build the perception of the company as an employer that people will want to work for.

Stability

No business will be able to succeed against its strategic goals unless there is stability within teams and departments. High staff turnover is a disruption that seriously impacts company performance, and HR teams must lead the way in preventing this, from hiring the right people and keeping them engaged.

Compliance

Every business across every sector needs to remain compliant with industry regulations or else risk penalties, fines, or worse. From payroll laws to the handling of sensitive employee information, a successful HR strategy will outline the steps and processes a business must take to remain compliant.

Using Technology to Align Business and HR Strategy

It is not enough to simply build a strong HR strategy if it exists separate to a wider business strategy. Human Resource departments cannot be siloed away from the rest of the business – these strategic goals and processes must be aligned and linked with the rest of the organisation to deliver a true a competitive advantage and deliver success for the company.

Investing in cloud-based HR software is an important step to streamline and automate processes, improve employee engagement, and deliver against business goals.

Empowering HR teams to play a wider strategic role in the business also requires thinking how the software these teams use will integrate and communicate with the other systems you have in place. It requires an alignment of the software and platforms your business uses.

The XCD solution is built on the Salesforce platform, providing a single source of truth for both HR and Payroll and a host of additional benefits for organisations already utilising the Salesforce platform for other areas of the business.

Implementing a single solution for HR and Payroll will help you to manage that alignment between those departments and the wider business goals. Let’s look at how.

Measure Everything

Measurement is vital to the success of Human Resources. With accessible HR data and customisable dashboards, companies can visualise key metrics from throughout an employee lifecycle. Analysing data on your workforce can help you to benchmark your progress against business goals.

True alignment requires gathering data on everything from talent acquisition to employee engagement, retention rates, employee performance and other key metrics, and applying this data to understand how the business is performing in terms of its human capital. This data can then be compared with other metrics that different elements or the organisation is tracking to create a complete view of how a business is performing.

This level of complete visibility is possible by integrating different software solutions but is much more efficient and effective with a single solution, especially if it’s built on the same platform as your CRM.

This also means that all your data is in one place, making it much easier to audit and remain compliant.

Understand your Culture and Budget

The best talent acquisition strategies can fall apart if they don’t include company culture as a foundational element. Experience and skills are only one part of how employees fit within your workforce. If you are hiring people who cannot thrive within the environment of your business, you are not going to be able to meet your business goals.

With the right HR software, you can seamlessly onboard employees and provide valuable resources to communicate your culture and educate new staff on what behaviours and values are expected of them. You can ensure these values are clearly visible and promoted in all interaction new employees have when joining the business.

Just as critical is having a clear understanding of budgets. With a single solution for HR and Payroll, labour costs can be instantly calculated, and other key metrics such as cost-per-hire or professional development costs can be tracked, allowing resources to be allocated where they are needed most.

Leverage Automation and Self-Service to Drive Engagement

Never underestimate the impact of empowering your workforce to do things themselves. With self-service provided across both HR and Payroll, employees can easily access their own records and payslips, keep track of performance reviews and KPI’s, or book annual leave all from the same portal.

Managers then have complete visibility of their staff, both in terms of their training and professional development, and when people will be off on leave. This is automatically updated across the whole system, giving a complete view of capacity within any given team at any given time.

But more than that, better technology equates to a better employee experience. Employees don’t need to file forms with HR to request holidays or contact Payroll for their payslips – instead enjoying a streamlined experience where they feel in control of their own needs.

Happy employees are more productive and more willing to go above and beyond for your company. This clearly impacts business goals and objectives, driving employee engagement and improving employee retention rates.

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