Alexandra Levits Water Cooler Wisdom The Strategic Elevation of HR

Alexandra Levit's Water Cooler Wisdom The Strategic Elevation of HR I’ve recently had the opportunity to work more closely with DeVryWORKS, which offers organizations solutions to acquire and retain the best talent, plan for succession, and close skills gaps. One thing has become very clear in recent years: the strategies organizations used yesterday to recruit, manage, and retain top people won’t work today. Increasingly, employees are looking not just for a job they like, but an experience that’s meaningful. Thanks to analytics tools, we are in a better position than ever to measure whether our initiatives are working as intended, and it’s especially critical that we are agile in the face of a continuously evolving business climate. Moving forward, I will publish one article a week here on topics of utmost concern to leaders and talent management professionals like you. Sometimes I’ll aim to help you build a business case for strategies you already know are imperative, and other times, I will introduce a new idea you might not have considered before. Lets start with a piece on how HR is changing. If you have been in the human resources profession for a while, you might have heard the legend of how HR originally became a thing. Allegedly, around the turn of the 20th century, The National Cash Register Company had a strike to which it responded by launching a “Personnel Department.” The new division was responsible for regulating wages, ensuring a safe work environment, keeping employee records, and responding to grievances. The HR function did not change for the better part of 100 years. While other functional areas grew and expanded, HR largely remained static and administrative in nature. If a new employee was starting or one was leaving, you contacted HR staff. Otherwise, you rarely (if ever) interfaced with them. As the economy has improved and skills shortages have increased, however, the competition for top talent has intensified. Now, effective talent management across the employee lifecycle â€" from recruiting and onboarding to learning and performance, has become a c-suite imperative. By necessity, leaders are calling on HR to advise on critical matters related to the longstanding competitiveness and overall success of the organization. In other words, the HR function has been elevated strategically so that every operation supports the larger business goals. But while many HR professionals grumbled about “not having a seat at the table” for decades, now that the seat has been granted, some aren’t sure how to contribute in the most effective way. If this is your situation, here are some recommendations to get started: Know Your Business Many HR professionals only know HR â€" and at a basic level at that. HR leaders who have the ear of the CEO, on the other hand, have a solid understanding of their companies’ position in the industry, how they are run, their unique histories, their products and services, and the roles that various functions play in achieving the organizations’ goals. If they don’t have experience with a function (finance, for instance), they are proactive in learning more about it. This deeper body of knowledge allows them to provide more meaningful talent management guidance to other leaders. Know Your Customers The most strategic HR professionals have a handle on both their internal and external customers. Speaking with representatives in other departments, they’ve become well-versed in the profiles of those who purchase their company’s products and services, those who apply to work at the organization, and those who are currently employed there. Think Beyond Tactics Far too often, HR is guilty of launching initiatives without a broader context, which are developed in a vacuum. Continuous improvement is good, but make sure there is a method to your madness. For example, an HR leader shouldn’t implement a shiny new applicant tracking system without first doing research on how individuals are currently hired into the organization. Focus on the Employee Experience Employee experience design involves thoughtfully considering what employees should feel and do at each stage of the employment lifecycle to maximize engagement, productivity, and retention. The old HR way involved a series of unrelated and isolated actions (i.e. an employee’s orientation agenda did not address the goals that would later be addressed in his or her performance review), but the new way is continuous and connected. Involve Managers Everywhere It is well known that the most critical factor in retention is the manager/employee relationship. Strategic HR leaders facilitate these relationships from the get go, ensuring that managers are mentally present for new hires and are taking specific actions to ensure that employees effectively assimilate into the organization and receive appropriate guidance throughout their tenures. Pilot and Measure Innovative Projects Strategic HR professionals understand that current processes and procedures â€" especially manual ones â€" have a limited shelf life, and that today’s HR organizations must be agile in their response to constituent needs. They constantly aim to do things in a new way, often taking a promising idea and implementing it on a small scale (for example, an onboarding portal rolled out initially to the marketing department) to see how it will play. And most importantly, they know that building a business case for a new initiative requires knowing how to use Big Data and analytics tools to measure a pilot’s success. HR is most strategic when everything it touches has business implications. If you find yourself constantly being asked to collaborate, that’s a good thing. It means you are headed in the right direction.