5 Ways Chief HR Officers Can Impact The Bottom Line
Reblogged from Forbes.com
By: Bertrand Dussert
Chief human resources officers (CHROs) hear the voices loud and clear: They must evolve to become strategic business forces within their enterprise. But when you pack up the slide decks and put away the research reports, what does that really mean?
The answer is deceptively simple: CHROs must help their company increase sales and create new sources of revenue—now and forever.
CHROs should help all employees generate more value. This topic dominated the onstage and backroom discussions at Oracle HCM World this past February. In his keynote, Oracle ORCL -0.02% CEO Larry Ellison asserted that the modern HR department’s efforts to find the right people, retain them, and help them grow professionally is essential for business success.
“Engineers are very important in terms of building the products. But who finds the engineers,” Ellison asked. “Customer service people are very important. Who trains the customer service people? In a modern company, HR takes on this expanded responsibility for team building and enabling teamwork. I can’t think of anything from a CEO’s perspective that’s more important than that.”
So how does the CHRO translate the demands of senior management into an actual revenue-driving plan? It requires creative thinking and a fundamental change in HR activities. Here are five steps that can get the money ball rolling.
1. Compete to Win: Business competition is tougher than ever, and a gap is growing between market leaders—Amazon and Facebook, for example—and their closest competitors. The same force is at work in the talent market: top talent delivers a bigger payoff than less-skilled peers.
To help senior management defend or improve market position, today’s top CHROs embrace (and encourage) the competitive instinct needed to deliver bottom-line value. They direct their organizations to uncover market advantages in the mountain of data their departments routinely gather.
For example, the CHRO’s team can analyze enterprise information to identify the people and processes creating essential value for the company. Armed with that information, the HR leadership team can set a short-term strategy to secure or develop the talent needed to maintain or expand these activities. That way HR can anticipate where the next labor shortage may be and act pre-emptively to avoid business disruption.
2. Capitalize on Collaboration: For collaboration to deliver value, it must integrate with business processes and encourage tangible results across a dispersed, diverse workforce. Most essential work today is not attributable to a single staff member; it takes a team to achieve success.
HCM strategies should be built to do two things: First, they should encourage collaboration as a business value. Teams with talent from multiple disciplines are essential to ensure that when new business opportunities or challenges arise, they’re fully addressed by line-of-business people, the IT department, sales, customer service, and any other relevant group. The right HCM strategy can put all these resources in place so they’re ready to act on new revenue chances.
Second, strategies should capitalize on collaboration to improve HR operations. Wikis, social media, and other collaboration tools help HR staff members understand the needs of employees and also give them self-service tools that reduce routine inquiries that can drain HR resources.
Find the other 3 ways CHRO’s can impact the bottom line here.
