In today’s world, businesses are continually being challenged to create value faster, be innovative, and stay ahead of their peers. To accomplish this, businesses need to be able to leverage their greatest asset, which is not necessarily their products, machinery, or technology. A company’s greatest asset is its human capital—its people—and managing this asset is essentially HR’s main challenge today. As an HR leader, you are probably asking yourself, “How do we enable our businesses to be innovative, create value, or be a visionary if we do not leverage our people effectively to achieve our company’s vision or our goals? And how do we do all of this in a world where talent is scarce?”

HR has an incredible opportunity to prove its value by setting HR strategy to support the company’s goals. However, if you cannot prove to your CEO or COO that you understand your business’s problems and needs and you are thoughtful about how your people strategy can support resolving these issues, your value will not be recognized and your opinion will be discounted in key business discussions.
We believe there are three main activities that need to occur to position you to be a successful HR leader:

1. Ensure your People Strategy aligns with your Business Strategy. Seems simple, right? But how many times have you seen HR strategic objectives identified that do not remotely link to what the business is trying to achieve? A quick check on your objectives could be: “How will this HR strategic objective support the business objectives?” If they do not link, then it is time to revisit your objectives.
2. Ensure your People Strategy is clearly defined and effectively communicated to your employee base. Do your employees understand what your human capital goals are, and if they are asked what the goals are, could your employees clearly tell you what the company’s human capital strategy is? Multiple studies have shown that when employees understand and can clearly state what the people strategy is for the organization, retention and engagement are higher than in companies where they do not. This means higher revenues due to higher engagement and lower costs due to reduced turnover.
3. Measure and revise your People Strategy to ensure achievement of the Business Strategy. Do you set goals and then measure your achievement of reaching those goals? If you truly want to show that the HR organization is adding value to the business, you have to be willing to change course mid-stream if your human capital strategies are not working. In order to do this, you need solid metrics and analytics in-house.

ScottMadden has helped companies transform their operations using practical, global experience and data-driven insights. Our human capital practice is second to none, and our goal is to ensure our clients successfully manage their talent to support business goals. Let us help you.