10 Tips About How HR Can Influence Business Strategy

10 Tips About How HR Can Influence geschftsleben Strategy10 Tips About How HR Can Influence geschftsleben StrategyDoes your HR manager and team influence your companys geschftsleben strategy and direction? Do they contribute to the key corporate discussions about customers, products, and strategy? Does your HR manager or director participate in senior-level meetings and planning? Do managers seek out their opinion about managing, legal issues, and how to build an employee friendly culture? If you can answer yes to these questions, and your HR team also initiates people programs and processes, welcome to the executive motherboardroom. Your team has made it. Congratulations on your career success. Still earning that seat at the executive table? These tips will fast forward your career or keep you sitting at the executive table for your longer term success. Understand Your Organizations Business to Influence Strategy Yes, you know, when youre buried in the day-to-day, its hard to re member, that youre running a business. Ernie and Harriet arent getting along. Have to play moderator. Julie doesnt understand her benefits. Have to hold her hand for awhile. Bob wants to know where to find training records. Mary needs to take FMLA time after the birth of her baby. Ah, yes, youre in the people business, a small business within a company. But, youre also in the bigger business of your organization. Spend time every day talking with sales, production, quality, and accounting. Make sure that you know what is going on in that bigger world. Know your customers, the cost of your products and how youre going to meet your monthly sales goals. You help the people get what they need to run the business efficiently, profitably, and respectfully in an empowering environment. Share Responsibility for Business Goals and Plans The overall business goals are your goals, too. When you make plans for your department, they should be directed to achieving overall business objectives as well as Human Resources goals. Developing a performance culture is a goal youll likely own. You contribute to the inventory turns goal, too. You supply the best people who are trained in the business, motivated by their work, rewarded by the company, and led by capable management. You are knowledgeable about the business and can ask questions that encourage continuous improvement by all. Know the Human Resources Business Thoroughly Your customers rely on you for correct and insightful information and advice. What more is there to say? You are reliable, credible, trustworthy and knowledgeable and you have deep integrity. If you let people down, theyll stop coming to you for information and advice. Theyll lose faith and confidence in your answers. And then, what good are you? (Remember, its always okay to say youll find out.) zulauf Your Department Like a Business to Influence Business Strategy Dont get so caught up in the business of your overall business that you forget to run your department like a business, too. Meet with your reporting staff members weekly. Meet with your department members every week to make sure all members are pointed in the same direction. Your goals must contribute to the accomplishmentof the overall business objectives. Your action plans to achieve the goals need to translate into daily to-do lists for your staff. Every significant activity requires a feedback loop or audit, so you know that it is being accomplished. As an example, new employee orientation is regularly scheduled. Does every employee attend? Are all covered policies, procedures and information detailed on a checklist that the employee signs? Are these checklists filed in the employees file? How frequently do you audit the records or attend the orientation, thus ensuring that what you think is happening- is, in fact- happening? Measure Outcomes and Goal Achievement, not Work Processes to Influence Business Strategy Human Resources handles the organizatio ns achievement of the overall goals. HR is also responsible for identifying and measuring goals specific to HR. FitSmallBuiness.com and Zenefits, an HR management platform, compiled a list of 39 possible measures that organizations can use to measure human resources. They then identified across multiple organizations the seven most common Human Resources measures in use to determine how the function is performing. The seven are Revenue per employeeCost per hireEmployee turnoverOvertime percentageAbsenteeismLength of serviceJob satisfaction rate Not surprisingly, the most frequently used measures may reflect some of the difficulties that are associated with developing appropriate HR measurement methods. They may also reflect the significance given to the human resource function and the idea that its activities should be measured in some way. fruchtwein organizations do not, for example, measure training cost, return on investment in human capital, value added per employee, time to fi ll jobs, return on training and seniority. These require more sophisticated measurement methods that may tax the ability of the HR team to gather data in plus-rechnen to everything else they do. These are the results measurements, not process measures (number of people trained) crucial to demonstrating HR success- the success that will land you at the executive table. Remember the People in Human Resources to Influence Business Strategy Is your office a magnet for people who need help, advice, or a sounding board? Are some of your visitors your senior managers? Even the CEO? If so, you remember that you are there to serve your organizations people so that they can meet your business goals. At Southwest Airlines, the Human Resources function is called the Office for People, and the senior HR person has a similar title. (HR titles are becoming more descriptive of the work.) First and foremost, you are there to serve the people. Judge your success by a day when the maintenance tech nician, a production worker, the Engineering Director, and the CEO all stop by for advice or just general discussion. How do you assess yours now? Express Thoughtful Opinions Backed By Data and Study You have to understand the numbers. How else can you offer a substantial, intelligent opinion about business direction? Learn everything you can so that you have opinions, and your opinions are backed up with data. You need to understand the effect of decisions that your office makes on the work of the rest of the company. (For example, dont schedule meetings with plant personnel on the last day of their shipping month.) It is not enough to say that you think certain actions by hiring managers would speed up your recruiting and hiring of employees. You must back up your recruiting methods and decision making with data. Harness the Benefits of Technology to Help You Influence Business Strategy Youll provide better customer service and free your time for dreaming up new value-adde d strategies. You cannot overestimate the impact of an effective Human Resources Information System (HRIS). Need reports about attendance? How about salary reports for your whole organization? Interested in turnover and retention figures? (Some of you may not remember what it was like when you did these calculations by hand.) Providing management-needed information quickly, conveniently, correctly and in useful formats makes you look good and feel good, too. People are your organizations biggest investment. Tracking their cost carefully makes business sense. Additionally, the use of an intranet frees up staff time because employees can enter their information into the forms. The intranet provides communication, training, and convenient answers and allows you to save your time for more creative, thoughtful, forward-thinking tasks- such as developing business strategy. Recommend Programs for People That Continuously Improve the Business When you propose new programs or harte nuss solve people issues, suggest solutions that support the accomplishment of business goals. You have reasons for suggesting a newvariable paysystem such as encouraging managers to accomplish business objectives. Whats better? The thank you card system appears to help employee motivation and productivity, or the attendance system has reduced absenteeism by 4%. Whenever possible, suggest new programs or changes to programs based on measurable objectives that support the business. Then, remember to measure the changes and evaluate whether the new process worked. When you offer systems and improvements that measurably improve an aspect of your business, you cement your seat at the executive table. Learn and Grow Every Day Through Every Possible Method to Influence Business Strategy Use your knowledge of how people develop to do what is necessary to continue your growth curve. Seek out a more experienced mentor or sounding board. You need someone you can confide in and learn from.Atten d professional HR conferences,meetings, and events.Attend executive leadership and management meetings in addition to your HR professional associations. You seek knowledge that goes beyond the bounds of your discipline and department.Attend at least forty hours of training and education every year. Make sure your staff members attend, too. Cover all aspects of the business and running a business. Seek out people who will ask you questions and challenge your beliefs so you can continue to grow. A colleague works with a CEO, who asks her questions. She may not always like them, but the questions challenge her to think things through and to follow issues to their logical conclusion. He repeatedly asks, How will you know if that is working? Happening? Bringing the results you want? You need to be able to respond. The Bottom Line There, you have them- the best possible ideas for what works to earn you a seat at the executive table. Lots of work. Undoubtedly. But, you invest the same numb er of hours in your job every week in any case. Why not make the hours you invest as productive, influential and strategic as possible? Youll be happy that you did.