“Strategy is about making choices, trade-offs; it’s about deliberately choosing to be different.” – Michael Porter
As your startup begins its expansion, it is critical to involve HR strategically from an early stage. Too often, HR is brought in later as an administrative function, missing key opportunities to enable growth. Integrating HR strategy with your business strategy from the outset can set your scale-up on a path to long-term success. Here are three reasons why:
1. Strategic hiring and retention practices are crucial when scaling
As you expand operations, strategic workforce planning is essential to have the right talent pipeline to facilitate growth. HR plays a vital role in talent attraction, compensation, development, and retention programs to both attract and keep the people you need.
Getting these practices right early on will minimise turnover drag and hiring mistakes that can limit your ability to scale efficiently.
2. Culture must evolve alongside growth
A startup culture that worked early on may not be suitable as your business matures
A startup culture that worked early on may not be suitable as your business matures. HR has a unique view into culture issues and can proactively structure cultural elements like your mission, values, policies, and incentives to match your growth ambitions. This type of strategic culture shaping can ensure your scaling strategy has the people power behind it to achieve your goals.
Allowing culture to shift organically often results in misalignment, confusion, and tension that can threaten progress.
3. Change management is required to scale successfully
As you rapidly add new employees, products, systems, and processes, strategic change management will smooth the transition so your people are prepared and engaged. HR plays a lead role in change management programs by assessing impacts, communicating timelines, training employees on new skills required, and providing platforms for employee input and support.
Missing this strategic opportunity can result in organisational silos, bottlenecks, and loss of productivity that can quickly derail your well-made scaling plans.
In summary, integrating HR strategy early on sets you up for scaling success by addressing three critical areas: talent management, culture evolution, and change management.
While it’s tempting to view HR as just an administrative or cost centre, especially in a rapidly growing business, that mindset can cause major issues down the road.
HR has immense potential to be a strategic driver and competitive advantage for your scale-up ambitions. The time to leverage that potential is from your earliest stages, not as an afterthought once scaling challenges emerge