Business is about people, and HR is about sourcing, developing and retaining the best people.   Today’s leading HR organizations not only execute HR transactions efficiently, they also help drive the strategic agenda and strongly influence the overall corporate culture. When all these organizational capabilities are present, the company transforms and it’s performance drastically improve.

We define Transformational Human Resources as an organization that accurately executes HR transactions, fosters a motivated workforce and aligns staff with the strategic agenda.

Execute HR Transactions

Sourcing talent, administering benefits and paying staff is the foundation of any HR Department.   Many HR organizations, with low levels of maturity, have difficulty executing against these core business requirements.  In these organizations, there is often a poor alignment between business processes, policies, system capabilities and training. This lack of alignment, frequently hinder basic operations and often requires heroic efforts on the part of HR and Payroll staff to maintain an unstable environment.

While HR and Payroll transactions are typically well understood, ensuring that transaction error rates consistently remain low and all compliance mandates are accurately followed can be challenging. An organization’s inability to manage this complexity frequently increases HR staff ratios due to increased service utilization – resulting in elevated HR costs.

In order to achieve operational alignment and efficiency, HR organizations need to comprehensively evaluate process and system pain-points across their end-to-end business processes. Once these pain-points have been reviewed and prioritized, the organization’s processes, policies and systems can be realigned to meet these requirements. To achieve this, it often takes an objective third-party that can look across organizational boundaries and existing system silos to rationalize the end-to-end process.

The War for Talent

Winning the competition for top talent is also a critical HR function. The latest social media and predictive analytics capabilities better enable organizations to consistently recruit high quality talent. In order to facilitate corporate growth, the organization must be able to recruit and on-board staff in sufficient quantity and quality.  The quality of senior leaders, staff and support staff ultimately determines the level of company performance.

Many companies are now recognizing the benefits of new SaaS HRIS products in the marketplace that can help them cope with compliance complexity, attracting talent, motivating staff while controlling HR costs. This new generation of SaaS products increasingly delivers higher transaction and analytics value to organizations at reduced cost. Once organizations have achieved accuracy in their core HR, Benefits and Payroll processes, they can shift their focus towards transforming the corporate culture and better aligning with the strategic agenda.

Facilitate the Strategic Agenda

Executive teams are responsible for setting and communicating the corporate agenda, while the rest of the organization is tasked with executing against it. By making sure that each individual’s work efforts are directly focused on the corporate agenda, the organization has the highest probability of achieving its mission. This has led to new Performance Management practices.

In the words of one Senior Executive, “The days of the annual performance reviews are over – or at least they should be. “ Employee feedback needs to be timely, relevant and continuous to make a performance difference. To this end, many organizations are replacing their annual performance review process with a more continuous feedback approach.

Human Resources can better facilitate strategic alignment by establishing communication opportunities that fosters two-way dialog and consistent feedback. The latest best-of-breed performance solutions help track an individual’s performance progress along with how they relate to overall corporate objectives.   These systems provide flexibility to manage, link, cascade and expose goals company-wide and also facilitate peer transparency and alignment of rewards. The ability to view cascading progress in a dynamic and responsive way is extremely helpful to achieve corporate objectives.

Organizational Culture

HR also plays a key role in transforming the corporate culture and maintaining the corporate brand. At higher levels of maturity, HR departments are able to partner with the Business to implement an array of effective talent management and culture changing initiatives. These include succession planning, leadership development, learning management, change management, employee retention and diversity.  Fostering active leadership and feedback, open communications, capability-building, employee empowerment all contribute to a motivated and innovative workforce.

Today’s HR organizations are being required to do many things to improve organizational performance and the ability to leverage HRIS technology makes a significant difference.  If you are interested in achieving High Performance HR for your organization, HBSC Strategic Services can help.