What does HR mean to you?
For me, it's about harnessing the right people and then engaging them,something absolutely integral to getting business results. This wasbrought home to me when I spoke at a finance director's conference theother week. We discussed ways to produce meaningful data for businesseson how staff retention and customer engagement, for example, link inwith profitability. Increasingly, people costs have come to represent afar greater percentage of an organisation's overall costs - in somecases nearly as much as two-thirds. Finance directors know this but theyhave been struggling to provide consistent data on so many peopleissues. We all know that staff retention is one of the direct indicatorsof the health or otherwise of an organisation. We halved the turnoverrecently of one company that had had terrible problems defining,understanding and then acting upon people-related metrics.
- What should an HR director's role be?
They need to have a very clear understanding of business objectives and,in our opinion, take a holistic view of how HR relates to them -something we call a working lifecycle. As the name suggests, this beginswith attracting and recruiting candidates - with businesses worryingabout how they can attract the applicants they want cost-effectively andwhether there are enough of them out there. The key to retention startswith induction, followed by staff development, analysing training needsand delivering them effectively. There's no doubt that reward is anotherarea that HR directors need to get involved with and, when the lifecyclereaches its end, it's up to them to find out why those who jumped shipwanted to do so.
- What's the biggest HR cock-up you've ever seen?
The best example I can think of involves an organisation that had had tomake cost-saving redundancies. It had gone through the consultation anddecision-making process with insufficient rigour. To make things worseit had completely distanced itself from the obvious need for emotionalrealignment among staff. By the time we were asked to get involved themistrust was obvious: staff alleged that the process by which somepeople kept their jobs and others didn't was completely unfair, withone-way, not two-way, communication to the fore. We found ourselvesinvolved in a really difficult job, picking up the pieces of poorcommunication. It took us a long time to do that and the organisationhad already lost goodwill among the staff it kept, as well as those wholeft.
