systematicHR

When we talk about employee engagement, we’re talking about the employee’s willingness to work an additional discretionary period of time to complete a unit of work.  This basically means the employee is committed to the organization, the project, the job, or the team – and hopefully a combination to more than one of those.  When we talk about engagement with HR, we’re talking not only about management’s view of HR as a business partner, but also management’s dependents on HR.  The key here is that you don’t want them to just see you as a valuable partner, you want them to see you as a critical and indispensable partner.

There are a few key questions I’d ask to discover if you are indispensable to management:

1. Do they know what you do?  This is of course the first hurdle.  If they don’t know what you do, they can’t possible value you.  I’m not talking about knowing that you do the recruiting or manage benefits.  I’m talking about if they realize you put together comprehensive workforce analytics and benchmark your organization’s competencies against the competitors.
2. Do they think you deliver?  It’s nice if you do a detailed survey of the organization.  However, can you make those analytics meaningful to the business user?  Do you even make those analytics available to the business user, or do you simply sit on the report within HR and talk about what to do amongst yourselves?  Delivery includes two things:  First, do you deliver and get product to management, and second, do you get them product that they don’t even know they need until they see it.
3. Do they think you are good at your job?  The next hurdle is if they think you are good at what you do.  So now you’ve delivered product, and it’s great.  Can you make it meaningful to them?  Most of our business managers are not focused on HR issues.  When we show them workforce analytics, they don’t know what to do with them.  It takes some time to help them understand what the talent implications are.  Allowing a manager insight into her workforce and where it is headed, where productivity barriers might be, and how eliminating those barriers improve their bottom line can be and should be a role of HR.  We can’t just deliver.  We have to create meaning.
4. Do they think you are strategic?  Ahh, so now they know what’s going on because you have created meaning out of some obscure analytics that previously were only decipherable by HR.  Can we please help our business managers by creating action plans with them?  They have great workforce analytics and now they know they need to improve the talent situation to improve the bottom line.  It’s our job to create that plan with them and follow through to implementation.  Once we’ve implemented, part of that plan needs to be about measuring the changes in the original analytic we produced, and hopefully also showing what the improvement to the bottom line was as well – the metric the business manager really cares about.

We all sit around and talk about things like “seats at the table” and talent management.  HR processes are great, but we need to realize that in order to really create value, we need to participate in the business.  By engaging management at all levels, we can do this, and finally make HR a profit center instead of a loss leader.