Is Your HR Strategic?

Is Your HR Strategic? In Blackboard Fridays Episode 74, Jacob talks about Operational Structure, Culture, Learning and Development, Growth Planning, and Leadership. Need this implemented into your business? Talk to the international business advisor who can do exactly that – Contact Jacob, Learn More, or Subscribe for Updates.

Ah, Human Resources. Are there any business functions murkier and more feared than time spent with your HR officer?

Well misunderstand no more! In this week’s Blackboard Fridays episode, allow me to walk you through the 3 levels of great HR:

  1. The operational essentials, which most businesses do although often not well;
  2. The strategic layer where great HR staff and providers will deliver you the most value; and
  3. The value-adds, optional parts of your business that mediocre teams don’t even know exist.

Much like accounting and marketing, you can choose to treat HR as “Compliance” – a necessary evil in your business, and part of the Red administrative burden [http://businessdepot.com.au/insights/r-n-r-roles-and-responsibilities-pt-1] you must endure.

OR you can embrace the Green growth potential [http://businessdepot.com.au/insights/r-n-r-roles-and-responsibilities-pt-1] of HR, People and Culture. This is where your best HR resources will want to play, and it’s the only solution good HR consultancies (we know a few, if you need an introduction) will suggest.

Struggle with HR? Watch this week’s episode here and discover the other layers you need, to shift from feared to embraced.

Who is Jacob Aldridge, Business Coach?

“The smart and quirky advisor who gets sh!t done in business.” Back independent since 2019.

Since April 2006, I’ve been an international business advisor providing bespoke solutions for privately-owned businesses with 12-96 employees.

At this stage you have proven your business model, but you’re struggling to turn aspirations into day-to-day reality. You are still responsible for all 28 areas of your business, but you don’t have the time or budget to hire 28 different experts.

You need 1 person you can trust who can show you how everything in your business is connected, and which areas to prioritise first.

That’s me.

Learn more here. Or Let’s chat.

Transcript

The most important function in your business is HR, Human Resources and yet despite so many SMEs talking about how their people are their greatest asset, they failed to place the importance on HR that is warranted some of that comes from confusing that many different elements of an HR function and as your business grows, an HR role.

This week, in Blackboard Fridays, we’re going to talk about a whole lot of these different areas to help you understand the things you need to be doing from an HR and some of the options you’ve got to turn your HR from an administrative function that costs a business money but is essential to a strategic function one that actually demonstrates your investment in your people, those people did you value so much.

We start here at the central line of this framework. We can see to a degree the career progression of your team in much larger businesses than yours, these different functions within that will each be covered by a separate person and indeed, perhaps, even their own team. From recruitment to induction and onboarding to managing staff reviews and ultimately, for measuring the career progression of your team members as we discussed a few episodes ago, of course, one of the necessary aspects of managing a team member is sometimes the performance. manage. When their performance is underwhelming, when they’re not achieving the task ,and they need a bit of extra attention, ideally, to shift them back on to this career loop.

Similarly, while we ideally keep them here in their career for the long term within our business, we do need to recognize that at times people will exit and our HR function, or our HR person, is responsible for handling the exit process.

Hopefully with celebration, sometimes, of necessity. In a micro business, when you, the business owner, are the person responsible for all oh HR, finding some time each year to perform and improve those specific tasks is important but as the business grows, you have the opportunity to really start building in different elements to start taking a chart from just that individual team member career progression and start embedding the HR person and as a result, all of their responsibilities into the broader strategy of the business.

At a high level, this means that the best HR people, are working with you, the business owner on things like brand, culture, and your strategic growth plan. Yet remarkably, I see a lot of businesses who have an HR person or an office manager with HR responsibilities and they’re not involving them in some of these key decisions.

How can you plan to grow in your business, which almost always involves from recruiting at some point, if you don’t involve the HR person who’s responsible for bringing those people on board? How can you build a culture and a brand to the external market if you’re not involving your HR person in making sure that they’re recruiting the ideal team member for your business, they’re inducting them into the brand so that as that team member performs, they’re spreading the brand and living the culture of your business.

Strategic HR also involves not necessarily doing but certainly taking responsibility for making happen a range of these different tasks across a business that add an enormous amount of value to your business bottom line and indeed the equity that you’re building in the business.

The workflow processes. Who is doing what tasks in what order and are they as efficient as they can be?

The policies and procedures. Are the manuals we’ve built for our team clear? And they’re our team working on continually improving them.

Training is amazingly something that a lot of businesses start to separate out. They’ve got a training person in the HR person and the two don’t talk to each other. Your HR person needs to know. They need to be involved because they’re the ones who are going to be saying, “The team need these skills.”

Wellness is not a buzzword anymore. It’s now critical, if you want to develop your team and indeed if you want to attract great candidates, that your business embrace a wellness strategy to help them to live the balanced and healthy life they want and frankly, if your team are healthier, if your team a more mindful, more present, more engaged, and have more energy, that can only mean great things for your business and again, strategic HR takes that into consideration.

The last element that I’ve got is Legal. Now, this covers everything from employment contracts to workplace health and safety and depending on the size and scope of organization that you run and the industry that you’re in, there may be many other aspects.

If you’re large enough to have a separate legal team or somebody separate with that legal responsibilities, it’s critical that your HR person has a relationship with them. Your HR person is going to be involved in so many aspects of each and every one of your team members that if they aren’t clear on the legal obligations of your team members, chances are your team are either not going to be clear or aren’t going to take it seriously.

Don’t get me wrong. Having an HR person who just manages this is useful. The larger you can grow, we’re having one person who has overall responsibility for that career progression, the more efficient and productive that entire process is going to be.

If you as a business owner want to grow your business and want to grow your business strategically rather than reflexively, then you need to empower your HR team or even your own HR skills.

So that it’s not just about the career progression of the individuals and it’s integrating them into the brand, culture, and growth plan, and ensuring that these different elements of your business, are documented, are communicated and are running efficiently.

Next Steps

Want to learn more about how this can apply to your business? It costs nothing to chat:

Related Posts

1 Response

Leave a Reply to Complete Blackboard Fridays Business Video Series Cancel Reply

Most Popular Posts

Categories

Archives