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 Improving the World through Strategic HR

The past fifty years have seen companies make major advances in the methods used to manage business operations such as finan- cial accounting and investment, information management, maintain- ing supply chains, managing manufacturing processes, and marketing products. But relatively few organizations apply the same rigor to processes used to maximize the value of their workforce. Due to the rapidly changing nature of work and the growing labor market skills shortages, we have now reached a point when human resource man- agement can and must be given the same leadership attention and stra- tegic focus that has been shown to other areas of business.

Here are a few of the reasons that companies need to aggressively pursue the use of strategic HR methods to drive business execution:

• It has an impact on the bottom line. The largest source of performance vari- ance in most companies is due to differences in the performance of people. Research has shown that high-performing employees generate far more rev- enue than average or poorly performing employees do. Furthermore, hiring and tolerating low-performing employees directly saps a company of financial resources, hurts workforce morale, and damages its brand reputation in the general market. The most effective way to build and increase long-term prof- itability in most organizations is to increase the performance of its employees.

T E N c h a p t e r

Hunt, Steven T.. Common Sense Talent Management : Using Strategic Human Resources to Improve Company Performance, Center for Creative Leadership, 2014. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/ashford-ebooks/detail.action?docID=827115. Created from ashford-ebooks on 2020-04-11 04:06:02.

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• We know how to do it. The profession of human resources has known how to maximize employee productivity for decades. This is mainly about consistently doing a few fundamental things really well. It starts with putting the right people in the right jobs through the strategic use of staffing methods. The next step is focusing people on the right things through the operational use of goal manage- ment and ensuring people are doing things the right way through effective use of performance management. Finally, for long-term success, ensure that people are given job assignments and access to training resources that provide them with the right development for what you want them to do in the future.

• We have the technology to do it. Until recently, one of the major barriers to the effective application of strategic HR methods was the inability to scale these methods across multiple employees, managers, and departments. Innovations in strategic HR technology have largely eliminated this barrier. The technol- ogy is available to drive significant improvements in workforce productivity. Companies just have to use it correctly.

• It reduces human trauma. The quality of a person’s work has a major impact on his or her happiness, health, and general well-being. How employees are managed not only impacts the lives of employees, but also it affects their fam- ilies, their customers, and their communities. We often joke about bad man- agement, but the reality is that bad management hurts people. Given that we know how to manage people in a productive and respectful manner, there is no reason for companies or societies to tolerate ineffective, incompetent, or otherwise inappropriate management practices.

This book provides insight into and advice on using strategic HR process to create positive business outcomes. How you use the information in this book will vary depending on your company’s unique business needs, company cul- ture, and employee population. But every company can benefit from applying the concepts I have discussed. As one of my mentors told me early in my career,

Strategic HR is relevant to every company because it is relevant to every manager. There is no manager in the world who isn’t struggling with some sort of people-related issue. When you ask leaders to describe the top three business challenges they are facing, invariably at least one, and usually all three, are people related. Every manager has concerns about whether they have the right people to do the work and whether the people they have are doing their work in the right way.

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10.1 NEXT STEPS HR professionals have the knowledge and tools to significantly improve the per- formance of companies and the happiness of the people in those companies. It is just a matter of using our knowledge and tools in a manner that makes a differ- ence. We know what needs to be done, and we know how to do it. Now it is up to us to make it happen.

Part of this is avoiding the tendency in HR to get caught up in trends or to become overly enamored with the processes, theories, and techniques we use to increase employee productivity. Managers and employees care a lot about the things that HR methods affect, but many of them do not care much about HR methods themselves. An analogy can be made to how most people feel about IT systems: we don’t really care what IT database platforms or servers our com- pany uses, but we do care about being able to access our e-mail accounts. The same can be said for how most managers feel toward staffing, management, and development methods: they don’t care what these processes are called or why they work; they just want to get the right people in the right jobs doing the right things the right way.

I titled this book Commonsense Talent Management in reaction to the ten- dency of some HR professionals to overcomplicate the field of strategic HR. HR authors and consultants often talk about the newest innovations in talent man- agement when in reality the most effective strategic HR methods are the sim- plest and most obvious: hiring people based on well-defined job descriptions, for example, and setting clear goals for employees and giving them actionable feed- back on how to improve their performance. These aren’t sophisticated or novel concepts, yet most companies struggle to do them consistently and effectively.

Strategic HR basically comes down to two things. First is determining how the workforce needs to change to support the company’s business strategies. This is about prioritizing business execution drivers. Does company success depend more on increasing workforce alignment, productivity, efficiency, sustainabil- ity, scalability, or governance? Second is determining how the company can use HR methods to create the change. Remember that there are basically only four things you can do to change the workforce: (1) put the right people in the right jobs by staffing based on clearly defined job requirements, (2) focus peo- ple’s attention and motivation on the right things through effective goal setting, (3) ensure people are doing things the right way by measuring their performance and giving them feedback they can learn from either directly through coaching

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or indirectly through staffing and pay decisions, and (4) provide people with job experiences and resources that give them the right development to do the things you want them to do in the future. Strategic HR processes can get complicated when you get into the details. But don’t lose sight of the fact that ultimately it is just about getting the right people doing the right things in the right way while getting the right development. The easier it is to explain strategic HR, the easier it is to get business leaders to appreciate the value of strategic HR methods and use these methods.

There isn’t one best way to do strategic HR. What models and process designs work best will change depending on the nature of the organization and the issues it is facing. No matter what processes you put in place, you will make minor modifications over time. But avoid making major changes too often because such changes can be quite disruptive. An analogy I use for HR process design is sailing a small boat with three or four sails. When you are sailing this type of boat, you constantly make minor modifications to the tension and posi- tion of the sails based on changes in the wind and water. How you change one sail will affect the performance of a different sail, so the process of modification never really stops completely. And every so often when there is a significant change in the weather, you will need to make a major adjustment by putting up a different type of sail entirely. The same thing can be applied to how you use the 4R strategic HR processes. There are slight modifications you can make to these processes every year to make them a bit more effective. And every so often, you may need to significantly rework one or more of the processes based on a significant change in your company’s business strategy or business execu- tion drivers.

10.2 PARTING THOUGHTS I have worked in the field of strategic HR for over twenty years. During this time, I have seen some pretty horrific HR practices. Many of these were perpe- trated by managers who were doing things that might have made sense to them but not to anyone else. In most of these cases, the problem was that these man- agers did not understand the factors that drive employee behavior and perfor- mance. In many others, HR practitioners were hopelessly overcomplicating what are basically fairly simple processes. In both cases, the problems could have been

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easily avoided if people had just thought through things a bit more carefully. Helping companies avoid these problems is one of the reasons I wrote this book.

The other reason I wrote this book is to help and inspire companies to achieve ever greater levels of workforce productivity. While I have seen my fair share of HR horror stories, I’ve also seen a great number of HR successes. I’ve seen what happens when HR is done well: improving the quality of HR practices has a direct impact on the health and well-being of employees, managers, customers, their families, and society in general. HR is about people, and people matter.

Good luck in your journey to make the world a better place through better use of strategic HR processes!

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