Why HR Matters: Tips for Talking to Your CEO

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.