What Every CEO Needs To Know About HR

In case you missed it, there is a great article on Bloomberg Businessweek today; “What Every CEO Needs to Know About HR.” 

A lot of organizations don’t know WHY they need HR.  Only that they NEED to have HR.  It has been my experience that there is a cloud of confusion surrounding HR and its value to an organization.   Yes, HR is there for compliance and employee relations.  But HR is there for so much more.   HR handles the “intellectual” management of the organization – HR handles the people.

While managers and directors may have the expertise in the operations of the business, budgeting, etc., HR ensures that the business goals are achieved through people management.      

Back in 2006, a study (Kahnweiler) identified five key challenges faced by successful HR professionals:

1. Lack of power;
2. Walking a tightrope;
3. Dealing with skeptical customers who view HR negatively;
4. Vulnerability; and
5. Being overwhelmed.

This was supported by an earlier survey from SHRM that showed that over half (54.8%) of HR professionals say the most frequently encountered obstacle to career advancement is HR’s not being held in high esteem by the organization. Basically, HR has some challenges.

To be successful, Bloomberg provided a list of tasks that the HR “head” should be focusing on:

1. Collaborating with you and other leaders to design and communicate a vision for the company, using every communication vehicle you have.
2. Selling your company to the “talent population,” in person, online, and via print and broadcast media. An HR leader should articulate the organization’s culture and story, not only for recruiting purposes but to fuel all of your activities with clients, vendors, media, and the business community.
3. Teaching all employees to tell the truth at work, especially when sticky interpersonal or political wrangles crop up. (Note to CEO: This includes telling you when you sound like a crazy person.)
4. Reinforcing a culture that emphasizes ingenuity over irrelevant, one-size-fits-all metrics.
5. Building a pipeline of qualified, energized people to fuel the company’s growth—scrapping the requisition-by-requisition, transactional recruitment model.
6. Shifting the HR function away from a break/fix model (“Benefits question? Second door on the left.”) to an embedded function in your business units.
7. Installing just enough HR process to meet your company’s regulatory compliance needs but not so much that people are stymied or treated like children.
8. Building a culture of collaboration that fuels every important program at your company. If your HR chief isn’t the advocate for people and evangelist for your culture, that’s a bad sign.
9. Asking your team members every day for their input on your business, their own careers, and life in general—not via a sterile, once-a-year “employee engagement survey.”
10. Replacing fear with trust at every opportunity, in policies, training sessions, management practices,  and via every conversation in the place.