Hi, I'm Mark Mitford . I spent 20 plus years working as a high level HR executive in corporate America with many fortune 500 you'd probably recognize. If y ou're a small business owner, CEO, or other professional, given the task of solving your company's HR issues and problems, then you're in the right place. Today, our episode is about great HR strategies and the key drivers behind them. So let's go ahead and get started.
What we're going to talk about today is a basic model that I've used for a number of years regarding just how to really construct and focus on creating a really great HR strategy for your company. And regardless of the size of the company, it is the first thing you've got to start out with is really focused on the structure of the organization. And all of this is going to wrap around culture .
So think about it too, that this is going to be somewhat of a wheel we're going to talk about and go around different points of the wheel. The first element is really going to be your structure. That's going to start out with your executive leadership team, going from whoever the owner is, CEO of the company, president. And then it'll go into other executive positions, such as marketing sales, operations, finance, and accounting, human resources, quality. And so on.
The key thing is that regarding your organization, you've got to go ahead and get it structured correctly. One of the things that we see a lot is that quite often the organization, especially as an organization grows, they don't have the right people or the right positions in place to be able to take care of the organizational need and be able to provide the best service for the , uh, for customers.
So structure is highly important, and we'll get into that in a lot more detail on subsequent episodes. The next thing you have to think about is overall, what is your people strategy when you're thinking about your people's strategy, how are you going to this is going to involve everything from selecting and onboarding your employees to leadership development.
Making sure that the leaders that are in place are, have the proper training and they understand the role of a leader within the organization. The other thing you need to be thinking about is how are you going to, what are you doing to retain your top talent and identify them appropriately? And ultimately, what are you going to be doing to promote those right people who are your top people, promoting them into leadership type positions over time?
The last thing we're going to just mention briefly today is also helping your employees have a career path. If you do a lot of hiring of entry-level positions, the key thing is you've got to have a career path for them because today, if somebody is coming into your organization and they're 18 years old or 20 or 23 years old, they're going to be very early in their, and one of the key things they need to understand is working.
They go within the organization because that's really going to be critical for them, because if they don't, if they feel like they're just have a job, then they're just working for a job on a paycheck. That's all they're working for. But if you take time to really focus on creating career paths for your employees, that will motivate them. And there's a much better chance that you'll be able to retain those employees. Long-term so that's another key element of the people strategy.
Another one is really having defined your core HR processes, and there's only doesn't matter what size organization you're at. Doesn't matter if it's 50 people or 5,000 people, you need to have core HR strategies clearly defined, and you need to have them to where you could replicate them. And they're consistently delivered throughout the organization. A few of these for example, are going to be around the, as I mentioned earlier, the hiring process, how do you hire people?
How do you interview people? Are you asking consistent questions to make sure you're getting the right candidates? Because quite often, a lot of companies that I personally see and that I work with, they don't have a really consistent hiring process. And they ultimately find out that they have great amount of turnover. And if you have a lot of turnover within your employee workforce, getting into 10, 20, 30, 40% annually, that's going to be a huge amount of cost to the organization.
Because each time you hire an employee, it's going to be probably around anywhere between a thousand dollars, all the way up to about $5,000 per time, you hire somebody. So let that number really sink in. So if you're hiring 50 people a year, that's a huge number when you start doing the math there. So it's critical to make sure we have a hiring good hiring process. The next thing would be focusing on a good process to reward people.
So the next thing we're going to focus on there is really focused around rewards and rewarding people is not just simply making sure you pay them and you pay them effectively, but it's also making sure you're paying them competitively because quite often companies don't do a great job of finding out what the competitive marketplace is doing externally. And so they find that they're actually not paying their employees competitively long-term .
But when that happens, that's not a good thing for employee retention and ultimately employee engagement. So those are some critical things you need to be thinking about there.
The other thing you need to be thinking about from a rewards perspective as overall, what I like to define as your total compensation strategy, and that would include everything around your person's pay to there any bonus they could possibly be eligible for vacation, anything like a 401k plan and perhaps a 401k match and their benefits, all those things wrap into rewarding your employees effectively.
So if you don't have a good reward strategy for your business, I would really position that you and emphasize that you should look at getting one very soon and really be thinking about it from a total compensation perspective, versus just what you pay your people, because that's going to be critical.
All of those things, as I mentioned, just over the last couple of minutes, your structure, your organizational structure, how you focus on retaining, hiring, and retaining and developing your employees. So having key HR processes defined clearly defined that are consistent, and then ultimately the rewards process for your business. All of those things end up to make a really great people strategy within your business.
And those ultimately, if you think about it, those will ultimately help to set the tone for your culture, because at the end of the day, your culture is the only thing that can actually differentiate you from the competition. That's really critical for you. So let me say it one more time. Your culture is the only thing that can differentiate you from the competition. You, any other company that you compete with can replicate your products, can replicate your sales process and so on and so forth.
So really focusing on creating a great culture will get you that much for the longterm and help your company grow and be around for a number of years. So that's what it is . Well, that about covers it for today. Thanks for listening for more on all things pertaining to HR, visit our website, HRcatalystconsulting.com, and don't forget to like us and subscribe to our podcast until next time. This is Mark Mitford . Thanks for listening.