Why Your People Strategy Matters as Much as Your Business Strategy

People strategy only makes sense in the context of a well-aligned business strategy.

While it seems to make sense that a company’s business strategy is more important than its people strategy, the fact is that people are always the most important aspect of a company’s business strategy. Even in today’s workplaces where automation is replacing many jobs and thousands of Baby Boomers are retiring every day, people continue to be an asset that companies find irreplaceable.

People Are the Business

People are the center of any company, which means that people strategy and business strategy are necessarily linked. The quality of your personnel will have a great part in determining the success of your business. Exceptional talent will get more done, get it done faster, and get it done to a higher level of quality, which will impact the business’s reputation and bottom line.

A people strategy that seeks to attract top talent and create a workplace that will retain the best possible employees needs to be a major part of your business strategy if you want to succeed. Such a people strategy starts with the recruitment and hiring process and continues through the employee’s life cycle with the company.

Just like business strategy, people strategy needs to be evaluated regularly to meet changing needs, advances in technology, and industry developments. Part of people strategy is figuring out the skills employees need and how they can acquire them as well as the traits that will be best suited to employees in particular positions.

Aligning people strategy with overall business strategy can help companies deal with changing needs.

Pursuing Alignment

Aligning your people strategy with your business strategy will help you meet objectives in a more organized and coherent way. Since the two strategies are so closely linked, goals in one area can’t help but overlap with those in another.

Aligning people and business strategies requires assessing market disruptions, external trends, and organizational capabilities to create solutions to drive hiring, performance, and growth. People strategy is all about taking a company’s vision and translating it into practical staffing decisions that can fulfill that vision.

A company’s HR department is not capable of handling a full-blown, aligned people strategy without support from company leadership and at all levels of the company. One way to identify skills gaps and traits that fit well for a particular position is to use assessments both before and after hiring takes place.

Narish assessments are some of the best available and can help companies with their people and business strategies, including alignment between the two. Let Narish International help you build higher-performing teams.