CareerCurve™

Recently, I was discussing HR positions and the different duties that go with that title and it occurred to me how many areas of the business this department manages.  This led to the following train of thought and many questions.  I would love to know your thoughts on this topic and any feedback or answers you could provide in the comments.

I’m sure I’m missing some, but a list of objectives of human resources off the top of my head are benefits, recruiting, interviewing, hiring, employee concerns and complaints, downsizing, retention, talent management, on-boarding, policy, law, employee paperwork, and possibly payroll.  Then within some of these areas, whole departments can exist.  For example, within the benefits department there could be a need for an HR Generalist to manage health & wellness, 401k, disability, FMLA, workers compensation and a host of other areas.

How in the world does a business determine how many employees it needs in Human Resources?  It seems like it would make sense that a set ratio exists, kind of like when my kids started school and we were looking into student/teacher ratios.  But what would that ratio be and how is it determined when there are things like applicant tracking systems and human resource management software that would affect that number?  And then we all know the age-old argument about having a seat at the table and being strategic – how does that tie in?  Does all this depend on what role the owners, board or executives expect HR to play within the organization?

When someone decides to pursue a career in human resources, what does that mean?  Does everyone have their own definition?  Did you know what you wanted to specialize in when you started or did you end up in a certain area because of experience?  I posted previously about HR using a lot of buzzwords and the confusion that results, but the term human resources sure seems awfully broad.

As I was researching the different areas and seeking a flow chart that would explain all this (I didn’t find one), I came across this article about the responsibility of HR employees.  This made me think even more about the challenge of working in HR.  If you read this article, you can see an example of how the author, an HR Director, was held accountable for things she had little to no control over.  Doesn’t operating in this manner ultimately hurt the business?  

How does a company figure out not only that it has the right number of HR professionals, but that they are responsible for the things they should be?

Please share thoughts and experiences in the comments.

Who would have thought that commuting costs would figure into a person’s decision to stay or leave a company?  Unfortunately, this is a fact now.  In my area of the country, I’ve seen gas prices of $4.35/gallon.  Most of the country has hit $4.00 and prices are expected to go up higher still.    Workplace studies show that the average commute for an employee is about 30 miles. Depending on the car the employee owns, this will really add up for some of your employees.  It reminds me of the question stay at home moms consider when deciding whether or not to reenter the workforce – does the cost of child care outweigh the salary and benefits?  Is it worth it?  HR departments need to explore ways to assist employees with these costs in an effort to retain and attract top talent. 

If you have employees who travel a significant distance to come to work, you can bet they will be considering a position closer to home.  They almost have to.  However, there are things your company can do to try to help your employees.

Change the schedule.– One example of this would be to lengthen each day and take Fridays or Mondays off the schedule.  Many employees would jump at the chance to work four, 10 hour days and have a three day weekend.  This also removes a roundtrip, saving a whole day’s worth of gas. 

Coordinate car-pooling. – You can do this yourself internally with carpool boards or on your intranet, or you can recommend employees go to a site that will do it for them, such as erideshare.com.  Encouraging your employees to get involved shows you are aware that gas prices are affecting them.  If differing schedules are an issue, be open to considering assisting multiple employees to get on the same schedule in order to make it work.

Offer on-site lunches.– Explore ways to feed your staff and keep them at work during lunch.  You may be able to negotiate special pricing with restaurants and catering businesses to make it more cost effective for employees to remain on-site.  This is also a great engagement tool, especially if once a month or so the company springs for the lunch.  Your employees get to socialize with other people in the company.  As with many of the other suggestions, this doesn’t have to be an every day event.  Offering the ability o order and buy lunch once or twice a week still helps.

Consider telecommuting where possible.- How many of your employees could work from home?  If you don’t want to make it permanent, be non-committal about the timeframe and relay to them that this is a program you will try temporarily, in order to help them get through this.  It doesn’t have to be all or nothing either.  Maybe some employees could work from home 1 or 2 days a week and be in the office the others.

Look into subsidizing public transportation.-  Are you familiar with public transportation in your city?  Can you offer incentives for employees to use it?  Or can you offer to pay for it?  This may prove to be a minimal cost compared to the cost of turnover and hiring and on-boarding.  Many times there are incentives offered by the public transportation authorities themselves such as group discounts or pre-tax savings for those who purchase passes through your company.  If your company is large, your organization may actually be able to negotiate an incentive program with the public transportation authority.

Work these solutions into your “green” program, too. – Many employees, particularly Gen Y, are interested in working for companies who care for the environment.  Going green is where it’s at, so you can use some of these solutions to demonstrate how you not only want to help your employees, but do your part to improve the environment as well.  You could roll the programs out as something you want to try to help with gas prices and want to keep in an effort to cut down on pollution. 

My best recommendation on all of these suggestions would be to take a vote.  If you’re not sure which program might be effective, ASK.  This situation provides your company with the ability to be transparent, which builds trust.  You can let them know you’re not sure what will work but you’d like their input and will explain any reservations.   The simple act of asking your employees what would help them demonstrates that you are aware of the impact that gas prices may be having on them and shows them that you want to do what you can to ease the burden.  Proving to them that you care will do wonders for your employer brand, engaging your employees, increasing retention, and attracting top talent.  Happy employees are productive employees, so putting in the effort means a win for everyone.  

Is your company currently offering any programs to help your employees deal with rising gas prices?  Do you plan to?  Please share any other examples in the comments.

A few decades ago, Human Resources was mainly centralized around managing personnel, policing corporate policy and keeping records.  As HR has evolved it has come to mean many things with many off-shoots under the Human Resource umbrella, and in some cases, the development of entire departments to manage separate areas.  For example, in some organizations Talent Management is its own entity that focuses on strategic functions such as inventorying the available talent pool, optimizing this individual talent to increase the organization’s ROI, and motivating employees to increase engagement (which increases retention which increases productivity).  In other companies, working in Talent Management means that you coordinate and execute training modules. The title Talent Acquisition may mean implementing tools like specialized testing, emotional intelligence assessment, and succession planning development where in another organization it’s simply a title for an entry level recruiter.

Think about the different organizations you know.  Are the industry buzzwords such as organizational development, performance management, learning and development, workforce optimization, and on boarding used in different ways to mean different things.  Are they sometimes interchangeable from one company to the next?  Many of these have been considered part of HR for awhile now but as more emphasis is being place on human capital, is this still true.

There is a lot of confusion around these buzzwords.  Each may have a different meaning, be a subset of HR or have evolved into a stand alone department.  But is this a negative thing?  Is it preventing Human Resources from showing itself to be a strategic business department that aligns its Human Capital with strategic business objectives? Do some of these functions like I/O psychology and process management have their own place to stand alone and then appear in individual departments such as operations and finance?  Is all this verbiage a good thing for HR only as long as it remain within HR?

Is each organization run differently using various definitions? I would love to hear your experiences and opinions in the comments.

How important is the human aspect of business? 

If you consider the success of a little company called Samsung, the answer seems to be VERY.  “On July 7, Samsung announced that its group operating profit for the April to June 2010 quarter was expected to reach a record 360 billion yen ($4.2 billion). The figure is 87 percent higher than that for the same period last year.  According to their President, their power lies in their philosophy of attracting the best and the brightest.”  Samsung places Human Resources first.  Ironically, many of the people that they choose to recruit and reward are from Japan.  By embracing a different focus from their Japanese rivals, this South Korean organization now dominates both sales and market share using the very resources Japan possesses, but has not cultivated.  Their people.

Their current President maintains the philosophy of their founder, Lee Byung-chull.  Though there has been some fine-tuning over the years, the basics remain.

In a biographical article about Lee, Samsung’s first business philosophy was first put into words in 1973, when the group cited the three principles of “engaging in business for national service,” “man and talent first” and “pursuit of logic and reality.”  Lee is quoted as saying he spent “80 percent” of his life recruiting and training people. 

The Samsung spirit, announced in 1984, consists of five principles ― entrepreneurship, morality, pursuit of best quality, perfection and coexistence and mutual prospering of businesses.

I’ve recently posted about HR and the employer brand and inspiring your employees by trusting them and letting them take risks. Samsung was the first Korean company to introduce an “individual-based business organization,” which focused on detailing exact company policies and business goals to every employee, giving them each larger autonomy to improve their productivity as well as larger responsibility. This proved to be an essential formula for Samsung’s success as a globally great company.

Not only does Samsung have a nice set of values laid out on their website (People, Excellence, Change, Integrity and Co-prosperity), but they walk the talk and align each employee with them.  They consider strong values the key to good business.  If you read what they say about each, you will see that all of these revolve around complete transparency.  This instills trust and loyalty.

What could your organization achieve if you revamped your onboarding process and engagement and retention programs to incorporate this mindset?  What if your role in HR was to work with individuals to align them with your company values?  Does your company walk the talk?

I’ve posted before about the mindset of the executives in an organization not valuing Human Resources and viewing the department as a necessary evil that costs money.  There seems to be a lot of companies with this mindset who choose to outsource this function.  How does this help and hurt the company?

To me, outsourcing HR seems to be a dangerous statement.  Isn’t this demonstrating a lack of concern for their people?  Human Resources, by its very name, is a resource for the most important piece of any company – the humans! 

I do see potential value in lowering costs by outsourcing some of the administrative functions, such as getting new hires on payroll or enrolled in the benefits program, but isn’t outsourcing an entire department that is supposed to exist to ensure happy and productive employees contradictory to the goal?

Wouldn’t any company want their main liaison between the production goals and the people responsible for achieving these goals to consist of a staff that knows the specific business, has a vested interest in success, and has a solid understanding of the long term, big picture?

Human Resources should be a strategic department designed to increase productivity.  How can you have a successful onboarding program if it is run by people who don’t work directly for the company?  How can you represent a trusting and caring environment if the message is that you hire a vendor to take care of your own?  I think if I were an employee of a company that outsourced HR, I would feel that the corporation didn’t want to be bothered to put people in place who are there in the trenches with me and genuinely want to make my professional experience the best it could be.

HR can be a very strategic department if it consists of people who know employment law, human behavior, business metrics, business law, production goals, engagement – the list goes on and on.  An internal Human Resource department that has these specialties covered will be an asset to any organization and I find it hard to believe that the same level of effectiveness can be found by outsourcing.

Onboarding has become a human resources buzzword but it seems as if many people confuse it with orientation.  The two are similar, but very different.  In fact, I suggest that orientation is simply one small piece of onboarding.  While orientation is an introduction to a new job and some of the nuances of the organization, onboarding is an entire process designed to immerse a new employee into the vision and culture of your company.  Engagement occurs more quickly and the process is also designed to assist in retention by making sure the employee aligns with the organization’s goals and wants to stay.

Onboarding is proving extremely valuable in many areas where human resources is currently challenged such as engagement, workforce optimization, and retention.  Successful onboarding programs result in an employee who is excited by their role, anxious to begin and feels valued for what they can bring to the table.  In other words, the employee becomes engaged quickly which results in a higher level of production in a much quicker timeframe. 

Recent research shows that employees decide shortly after they are hired how long they plan to stay at your company.  Anything you can do to make sure they feel welcome and valued from the day they are offered a position is going to lengthen the time they choose to stay with you. 

Another benefit of an effective onboarding strategy from the date of hire is the effect it has on counteroffers made by their current company.  If a candidate is offered a role and you maintain contact with them in a very positive and welcoming way while they are deciding, they are more likely to view the offer of a raise from their employer in a new light.  Instead of thinking that they just earned a raise, they are more likely to question why they weren’t more valuable to the organization yesterday.  They will also feel great about accepting a job for a company that is already showing that they value the talent they are hiring.

Once a role is accepted, reiterating over and over in many meaningful ways that the employee made the right choice will do wonders for your engagement and retention rates.

Does your organization have an onboarding process in place?  Have you seen this affect your production and retention rates?  If you don’t have a process established, do you see the need for one and are there plans to create one?