So, people don’t generally say it to my face, but I know how a lot of people feel about HR. Like we’re all
Suck in! We’ve got the CTO and CHO right behind us.
coming in with our little clipboards, enforcing rules no one ever heard of, creating work for ourselves by having complex recruiting rituals, insisting on performance evaluations when you can see for yourself everyone’s doing just fine! I know. It’s okay.
But what I also know is this, if you have a good HR executive on your side, working with your C-suite, your profits are likely to be higher; you’re more likely to reach your company’s strategic and operational goals; and you’re a whole lot less likely to get in trouble with regulatory agencies–those guys are serious about their clip boards.
How do I know your profits will be higher? A recent study of Fortune 500 companies, done by SuccessFactors, an SAP AG company, showed that those with a senior HR executive are more than 100 percent more profitable than their industry peers without one. The results of the study were published by the Society for Human Resource Management.
The reason these companies are more profitable is simple: Your company is your people. How can you make a strategic plan for your company that drives profits without someone who is focused on issues like movement in the talent pool, changes in benefits and regulations that impact how you recruit and hire, reward and culture issues that inspire engagement and productivity?
It’s great and crucial to have someone handling all the reams of paperwork. But that administrative function of HR—while vitally important—isn’t the high level stuff that can help you reach your strategic goals. You wouldn’t necessarily put the person who keeps the books in charge of managing your company’s financial strategy, right? And if you did, you might think the same about CFOs as you do HR execs.
Do you have someone in a position to listen to the CEO’s vision, the CFO’s goals, the CTO’s concerns and the COO’s and come up with a strategy for hiring, management, compensation and other issues that help them further those goals? What could be more important to the execution of your goals than the people who will be executing?
Every couple of years, somebody sends out some article or blog, shot across the bow of the business community saying “What is the purpose of HR?” That person might have seen some rote performance evaluations or known a lackluster HR expert…yes they are out there. But the real question isn’t “What is the purpose of HR?” The real question is how are you using HR?
Because if you’re seeing it as an extraneous administrative function, you’re missing out on a lot of opportunity. We can help.
We work with companies on a project basis or on retainer, providing a custom level of HR help designed for your business. Contact me at Caroline@valentinehr.com or call (512) 420-8267.
