HR's Evolving Image

Bring on the Strategy

Loeper says one of the biggest strategic concerns for his clients and their directors is succession planning. Corporate human resources departments have taken the lead in identifying and retaining future leaders. Since most employees no longer work their way up in a company over 30 or 40 years, businesses are no longer assured of homegrown leadership. Identifying potential leaders among the staff and engaging them in training and development programs will ease short- and long-term business planning.

Larimore points to the coming baby boomer retirement bubble as a reason for HR to be extremely involved in talent development and retention strategies. “You’ve got to be proactive or you’re going to be talentless,” she says. Employers should find the right tasks for talented employees, ones that challenge but don’t overwhelm them, Larimore says and notes that it involves giving key employees new responsibilities that relate to a leadership position he or she may one day step into. Or let an employee step into a new job altogether if the situation arises. “One of my recruiters was out on maternity leave this summer, and I brought one of my junior recruiters in to stretch her into the assignment for three months,” Larimore says.

Sometimes, strategic goals are intangibles. Masters-Wolfe says that over the last five years, all Twin Cities Public Television employees have learned how their job fits into the organization’s strategic plan. In fact, the plan specifies that employees will focus their performance around it.

The public television HR team also runs an onsite education program, dubbed TPT University. Employees can take classes on a range of topics, including information technology and performance management. “We have a very tenured staff without a lot of possibilities to be promoted, so this strategy gives all our employees the opportunity to broaden their depth of knowledge,” Masters-Wolfe says. “We hope it’s a retention strategy as well.”

Technology is also advancing the role of HR. Larimore uses an HR dashboard—a computer screen that displays at-a-glance measurements and data pulled from a database—to help her keep tabs on projects and offer critical information to company leadership. For example, one of Larimore’s goals last year was to reduce bank teller turnover by 25 percent in one year. Each quarter, she would check in with the CEO on progress to date. “I can go in [to the dashboard] and pull out what a teller turnover costs us,” she says. “Our goal was to fill a teller job within 30 days, and this year our time to fill a teller job is 28 days.”

Ernste says that HR can tackle financial goals as well, using formulas, for example, to determine if the current sales force is adequate to support, say, a 15 percent increase in revenue. Other factors that HR can help to determine include: a profile of the type of sales candidate that would be successful in a company, recruiting strategies that attract the right candidates, and an incentive plan that entices the best sales employees.

Despite all the strategic work human resources professionals in the Twin Cities are doing, they’re going to have work harder to show executives what exactly they can accomplish. The “Aligned at the Top” study suggests they are not being recognized for their strategic capabilities. “HR needs to make sure they have a life line to the CEO and the leadership team,” Masters-Wolfe says. “Tell them how HR can be a part of the business strategy rather than just continuing to focus on the administrative side of HR.”