Why HR Matters: Tips for Talking to Your CEO
Posted on February 24, 2014

The best HR professionals have the power to help drive growth and serve stakeholders across the organization, from employees and frontline supervisors to business owners and C-level executives. During her session at Paycor's HR & Compliance Web Summit earlier this year, Meera Alagaraja, PhD, of the University of Louisville, offered her tips for communicating HR’s real value to CEO and operations:
Understand what the CEO needs
HR must not cater only to individuals and transactions—that's low-risk
and low-reward. Strategic work is where HR can add value and be an
advocate for the larger interest of the organization. HR needs to
provide executives with practical tools for issues such as:
* Talent management and succession planning
* Creating the employment brand
* Managing four generations in the workplace by integrating technology
to retain the brightest and best
* Employee communications
* Navigating social media
* Trend analysis and forecasting
* Change management
Design an HR scorecard
Tracking metrics allows HR to define success in relation to business performance and provides a new language to use when communicating to operational managers and CEOs. Metrics also help HR team members clarify vision and strategy and translate those concepts into action. Here are four elements to consider:
1. Financial
Termination costs, turnover costs and the expense of training new
employees all help show HR’s bottom-line value and get the attention of
C-level decision-makers who need to understand the importance of
managing human capital.
2. Customer Experience
To achieve your organization’s vision, think about how you want HR to
appear to your internal customers. Keeping an employee engagement index,
surveying employee career satisfaction and benchmarking the quality of
new recruits will tie HR’s efforts back to reducing turnover costs and
increasing retention.
3. Process/Innovation
It’s crucial for HR to have successors identified for key positions
throughout the organization and to maintain HR’s core competency:
transaction effectiveness. The former helps build and maintain a
positive corporate culture. The latter is another way to mark service to
internal customers based on timeliness, cost and quality.
4. Talent
How you handle talent speaks to how an organization will change, grow
and prosper. Major metrics are: retention rate of new hires; timeliness
of talent reviews, including employee feedback; and diversity throughout
the organization, including the senior leadership team. Too few
operations executives see how talent relates to business strategy. HR’s
role is to link talent management to the bigger picture.
*To hear more from Meera, watch her recent webinar
here You also can
learn about how Paycor can help HR professionals add strategic value to
their organizations with our suite of solutions, including:
* A robust applicant tracking
system
that streamlines the hiring process and prevents you from missing out on
top talent
* An HR
application
that provides tools for training administration, document archiving and
employee communication through a secure portal
* An HR Support
Center
that includes sample documentation for performance reviews, social media
policies and numerous other useful forms
* Custom
reporting
that allows HR and company executives to compile and analyze data
quickly and efficiently
Get in touch with us to find out more about how these tools can help your HR staff play an integral role in organizational strategy and influence C-level decision-makers.