Why Business Owners and HR Professionals Alike Need COO Skills to Drive Continued Success

Why Business Owners and HR Professionals Alike Need COO Skills to Drive Continued Success

by | Mar 3, 2022 | Blog, Business Owners, HR

Organizations today are faced with compounding challenges: staff resigning at unprecedented rates, extreme competition for new talent, an ever-evolving world of compliance and regulation, an agile market of technology, supply chain challenges stretching across ranges of industries, and more. What these challenges come down to is that most organizations are forced to do more with less. Each individual within an organization is being asked to stretch to the next level of development, and fulfill a plethora of “other duties as assigned”. While the traditional approach is for HR to be the facilitator of these assignments, more forward-looking organizations have realized that HR should be the star-player – filling their own “stretch assignment” by fulfilling the organization’s operational needs from within their own role.

Even a decade ago, Deloitte published a report on the emerging role of the HR COO. At that point in time, they foretold: “In the months and years ahead, more and more CHROs will embrace the HR COO model as they strive to crack the code for operational excellence in HR service delivery. Recognizing that even the best people cannot excel in a sub-optimal operating model, they will make the call that only leaders can make — to change the operating model of the HR organization to harness the power of how.”

In the years that have passed, more organizations have embraced the approach, and key HR leaders have seen the value in supporting their organizations through taking a broader, more operational approach to leadership. Below are four key COO skills that will support any HR professional in better serving the operational needs of their organization.

 

1. Visualize Problems and Solutions

A strong operational leader needs to be able to visualize not just the problems of the organization, but also the solutions. An organization’s HR leader has a perfect perspective for this, as they already have a full understanding of the company’s structure, talent, roles and key objectives. Taking the role one step further merely requires the HR professional to get involved in the challenges in other areas and ask questions. Their unique perspective and understanding of the full organization will allow them to visualize the problem from a high level view, and help articulate a practical solution that others may not see.

2. Use Data to Drive People Operations KPIs

HR professionals cannot be afraid to learn the numbers driving the organization. While it is appropriate for the controller to be in the driver’s seat here, the HR professional must work closely with the finance team, understanding the budget and the financial statement to use key data to make decisions. Without a personal understanding of this data, they’ll always be relying on someone else’s recommendations, rather than empowered to wholly make their own people operations decisions, setting the appropriate KPIs for their organization.

A few examples of KPI data that is important to track, analyze and use are –

1. Turnover/Attrition Rate
2. 90 day quit rate
3. Employee engagement index
4. Training Impact Score

These are just a few examples of KPI’s. Keep in mind there is a difference between leading and
lagging KPI’s!

3. Create, Develop and Manage Systems

While technology may have a separate home within the organization, once again, the key HR leader that wears an operational hat must truly be involved in systems-related decisions. When implementing a new system, the HR leader is in the driver’s seat. If a system is already in place, the HR leader should be in-tune to the needs of its users, recommending development needs, and ensuring it is well-maintained. Again, if the leader is relying only on the expertise of another team, they are forgoing the chance to truly own their own decisions for the organization.

4. Analyze the Operations of the Business

In all circumstances, HR should be a key business partner to the organization’s executive team. This is critical not only to the success of HR, but to the success of the organization. Involving HR in operations analysis benefits HR by:

● Shining light on talent management needs
● Allowing the opportunity to recognize top performers
● Gaining insight into individuals who may be flight risks
● Recognizing functional or organizational issues that may need restructuring
● Recognizing employee relations issues that may need attention

Well beyond those benefits, involving HR in operations analysis benefits the organization by:

● Gaining a new perspective on key business issues
● Ensuring that there is an “unbiased” voice at the table, who does not represent a particular department or product
● Allowing for holistic solution finding that incorporate all areas of the organization
● Having a voice at the table who truly understands the talent of the organization, and can offer recommendations to fill short-term talent needs for special projects or initiatives

5. Gain insight on the P&L

There are many reasons why it is beneficial for an HR professional to not only familarize
themselves with financial statements, but also make sure that People Operations expenses are
tracked and measured as well. Some of the key financial benchmarks that can be applied to and
visualized are –

● Talent and Recruitment Expenses
● Training (includes onboarding training and ongoing training)
● Labor cost (includes the cost of workers’ compensation)
● Overtime – It’s important to distingish if your overtime is due to unfill position or increased absences that require other team members to fill in, or if the overtime is driven by business growth that is stretching resoruces and capabilities.

 

Overall, HR professionals that “stick within their own box” of HR are not serving their own interests, or the interests of their organization. The more that HR leaders can gain a broad perspective and a larger role as a key partner in the business needs of the organization, the more the organization is sure to benefit.

The Top 6 Reasons to Outsource Your HR Functions

The Top 6 Reasons to Outsource Your HR Functions

by | Feb 17, 2022 | Blog, Employees, Remote Hire

According to research firm Technavio, HR outsourcing will grow at a rate of nearly 9% over the next four years. As a leader or HR professional within an organization, this may seem surprising. HR is a critical enterprise to the organization, shouldn’t that mean it needs to stay in-house? The answer, as many businesses are now finding, is not necessarily.

There are many reasons why you might consider outsourcing your HR functions, or some portion of them, to a trusted partner. Read on to see our top six.

1. Gain access to a full team of professionals

The number one spot is a clear frontrunner: assuming you select an experienced trusted partner, you’ll be gaining access to a full team of professionals with wide-ranging expertise in human resources functions. Depending on the size of your organization, you may be operating with an HR team of one – or worse, an “operations” expert who is tackling the jack-of-all-trades functions including HR alongside accounting, budgeting, legal guidance, and anything else viewed as an administrative burden. When outsourcing your HR functions, you’ll tap into a wealth of knowledge that you previously lacked, and new experiences to draw from.

Within your organization, you may only need to hire once every few months; you may rarely need to navigate more complex functions like leaves of absence paperwork, international payroll, or legal concerns. What that means, put simply, is that even if your top performer is handling these functions, they do not have expertise in them. It is likely that unusual hiring scenarios or employee concerns may be unprecedented more often than not. When outsourcing, you’ll be working with HR professionals who have seen it all – because all they do is process critical HR transactions, they have seen every unique example of each one, and will be well-equipped to step in when it occurs at your organization.

2. Gain confidence in your compliance with legal and federal guidelines

Again, your organization’s well-meaning catch-all administrative expert may do the best they can, but they likely won’t be as well-tuned to the industry as a team of HR experts. When outsourcing, you can stop trying to keep up with email subscriptions and newsletters to tell you about pending regulation changes – your external HR partner will not only be accountable to keep you informed and compliant, but will likely be aware of any changes as soon as they occur.

3. Gain access to top-of-the-line HR technology

Staying informed on ERP technology trends is a lofty goal; implementing them in your organization is a much greater challenge. While negotiating your outsourcing agreement, you may consider seeking information on the new partner’s technology stack and how it compares to yours. If you find theirs to be more advanced, it may be worthwhile to see if there are licensing opportunities to allow your employees access to self-service functions and other HR needs within their tool of choice, improving the employee experience.

4. Gain access to a new trusted business partner

As you are hopefully already aware, an HR expert is more than just an I-9 and payroll form processor. Just as is true for your internal HR expert, an outsourced HR team has the potential to become a trusted business partner, providing you wide-ranging feedback and shaping your business processes across the organization. Depending on the structure of your outsourcing agreement, your HR partner can be truly embedded in your business, and will serve as a new advisor and a fresh perspective as you make critical decisions moving forward.

5. Gain a new strategy to reduce risk

While this ties into several of the benefits already mentioned, it is worth discussing as its own separate benefit because it is top of mind for so many leaders. As you can imagine, many of these benefits will reduce your overall risk. Gaining the expertise of a team of experts, relying on their understanding of legal regulations, adding a fresh perspective to your business, and even gaining new technology can all reduce your risk. However, even more directly, depending on the structure of your agreement, your new partner may now shoulder some of the risk by performing some of your HR functions, especially if you indicate specific metrics in SLAs that the partner agrees to meet. These stringent standards will ensure your HR processes continue to be performed with consistency and quality as your team expects.

6. Gain the time you need to prioritize your business

At the end of the day, outsourcing your HR function allows you to focus on your core competency: driving your actual business product forward and leading your team. Relieving your team members of the time spent on day-to-day HR processes will allow them time to be repurposed to other business-critical needs.

While the prospect of outsourcing a critical function such as human resources may seem unorthodox, there are advantages worth considering for any organization. Take the time to consider the state of your human resources team and function today. How strong is it? What other critical functions are they also performing for your organization? How much expertise do they have in unique HR use cases? Depending on your answers, you may find that a high amount of value in exploring an HR outsourcing arrangement.

Employee Retention 101: Embracing Equity in your Workforce

Employee Retention 101: Embracing Equity in your Workforce

by | Jan 3, 2022 | Blog, Employees, Retention

Welcome to our fourth and final installment of our Employee Retention 101 series. If you’ve caught our other Employee Retention posts, you’re familiar with the urgent need for employee retention based on an increase in resignations among many organizations’ top talent. You’ve also brushed up on some of our suggested strategies so far, including launching a talent enablement program, honing in on talent and development, and prioritizing truly effective performance conversations.

While the number of employee retention strategies you could choose to implement is likely as long as the list of your employees, we have chosen the few that are likely to be the most broadly effective; in other words, we’re prioritizing the most “bang for your buck”. So while we could certainly continue this series indefinitely (and we’d love to!), we’re ending it here with one final strategy: embracing equity in your workforce.

If you’re an adult human with access to the news, especially in the United States, but truly anywhere – you likely are aware that equity is top of mind for many, across races, religions, sexual orientations, gender, age and all other aspects of identity. Creating an equitable and inclusive workforce is a lofty goal – but moving in that direction is a minimum requirement for retaining your best talent, and one that requires full executive sponsorship, organizational vision, and accountability at all levels.

Promoting Equity through Hiring

A few statistics on the state of the workforce today:

Interestingly, despite these statistics, diverse companies actually perform better:

 

While it isn’t easy to create a more diverse hiring process, the first step is acknowledging the need to create a more diverse hiring process. There are many steps to increasing the diversity in your pipeline, and simply doing research into the possibilities is a create start.

  1. Create an internal diverse hiring task force to guide your process.
  2. Expand your hiring pool by recruiting actively among target audiences through conferences, networking groups, etc.
  3. Set goals that are appropriate based on your current workforce and your industry.
  4. Look into options for technology that may help you – but remember, technology comes with challenges too, so keep your HR staff close by.

Promoting Equity through Pay Transparency

According to a survey, 51% of adults would switch companies to one with greater pay transparency. What does this mean? That depends on the organization.

Some very progressive organizations, like Buffer, post salary information for all of their employees online publicly for anyone to access. This level of true transparency forces the company to be accountable for the difference in pay between any two employees in the company, since it may be questioned at any time.

Other companies may view pay transparency as telling their employees where they are within a certain pay grade, why they fall at that point in the pay grade, and what they need to do from a performance-perspective to increase their pay. While this is not quite “transparent”, since it does not confirm to the employees that their peers are paid equitably, if the pay scales are truly applied uniformly across the staff it can be effective.

It is widely known that women are paid less than men; while many factors contribute to this, one factor is that women are less likely than men to negotiate their pay and to receive a raise when they ask for one. However, according to Colorado State Senator Jessie Danielson, insight into their pay range helps prevent this effect to some degree.

The company PayScale provides a spectrum to guide organizations on a pay transparency journey.

Embracing Equity
  1. Tier 1: Company provides employee their individual pay information only.
  2. Tier 2: Company provides employee the market data that was used to determine their salary.
  3. Tier 3: Company provides employee additional information into their compensation structure, including salary ranges and parameters.
  4. Tier 4: Company provides employee additional information regarding individual factors for determining pay.
  5. Tier 5: Employee salaries are posted publicly.

 

Promoting Equity through an Inclusive Culture 

Once an organization has assessed their hiring and their pay transparency, it might be easy to consider the work complete. However, unfortunately, much of the hard work is still yet to be done. As we’ve discussed in other posts, culture is not built overnight and must be nurtured and developed. In this case, equity must be promoted through an inclusive culture.

Hiring diverse employees and paying them fairly will not build an equitable workforce until they are also treated inclusively within the organization. Who is invited to the table when key decisions are being made? If an impactful project is about to be launched, who decides the team members? How are they selected? Does the team vary from project to project?

If your organization relies on the same individuals for task after task, you are set up for several risks:

  1. Those top performers are likely to burn out.
  2. Other high potential individuals who are not included are likely to find other opportunities.
  3. Your organization is missing out on new and impactful ideas.

Ensure that you have a system in place to manage the skills within your workforce, so that when an opportunity arises, you can call upon the best team of people, instead of the usual team of people. Again, prioritize diversity from the top down, and monitor your progress.

Thank you for joining us through our Employee Retention 101 series. If you read each article, you should now have actionable tips to take back to your organization to:

  1. Launch a talent enablement program, including:
  • Effective performance management conversations
  • Powerful talent and development tools

2. Implement structured career planning

3. Promote equity in your workforce through hiring, pay transparency and an inclusive culture

Of these strategies, it is essential to first assess your talent pool and determine where you think your priorities lie. Who are your current top performers, and who do you think is at risk of leaving for other opportunities? What do you think is most likely to incentivize them to stay?

If you aren’t sure, oftentimes the best strategy is to ask – set up a focus group or 1:1 interviews. If nothing else, it will help your employees to feel valued and appreciated.

Based upon the strategies shared, we’d love to hear – what do you plan to implement first? How do you think it will impact your team?

Employee Retention 101: Performance Conversations That Help Your Team Perform

Employee Retention 101: Performance Conversations That Help Your Team Perform

by | Dec 15, 2021 | Blog, Employees, Retention

If you’ve been with us on our journey of discussing retention strategies throughout our Employee Retention 101 series so far, you understand that talent enablement is essential to retaining your top talent, and requires you to stop creating unnecessary burdens that hinder your team’s development and long-term success.

When you hear the word “performance conversation”, it may cause you to cringe, imagining an incompetent manager with a tie in a poorly decorated conference room, discussing unmet performance indicators. However, performance conversations are still essential to enabling talent in highly performing teams – they simply have to be done in a way that they actually lead the team to improve. There are several important strategies to implement now to ensure performance conversations in your organization are effective.

Quarterly Goal Conversations

First, eliminate your annual review – it isn’t motivating your employees, your managers aren’t delivering valuable feedback, and there are no results being generated. Chances are, your employees waste valuable time stressing about their review – both worrying about the result, and preparing their self-review – only to be disappointed by lackluster feedback that isn’t actionable.

 

Instead, implement quarterly conversations to discuss forward-looking goals and performance planning, without spending too much time harking back on the things that have already occurred. Then, ensure that you’re meeting regularly to check in on progress to ensure forward momentum.

 

On-The-Spot Coaching

Since issues and problems do need to be addressed, do it on the spot. This will be much more effective than trying to wait for a planned review time or 1:1 meeting – first, because the occurrence will still be fresh, and second, because it takes the pressure off of the planned meeting, reserving that time for productive planning conversations.

While this on-the-spot coaching can feel awkward or uncomfortable at first, it will feel more natural as it becomes a regular part of your team’s culture. Remember to keep your feedback task-based (rather than personal or relationship-based), and action-oriented. Offer constructive feedback for how to move forward, or better yet – game plan the solution together. Having open and honest conversations with your team will help develop a stronger relationship in the long run, improving your likelihood of retaining your top talent. Similarly, help your team to feel comfortable reciprocating the same type of feedback to you – truly ask for it on a regular basis, and eventually, they will realize it is a genuine request.

Career Development Conversations

A key component of a talent enablement program is ensuring that talent has a place to go; that it is not hoarded in one role or one team simply because it performs well there. Instead, the best talent should be encouraged to grow throughout the organization naturally.

Again, the best approach here is transparency and honesty. Forward-looking organizations involve their employees in this planning process. While detailed succession planning can still occur with leadership behind the scenes, bring the end result back to your direct reports in an open conversation. Where does the organization see their future? What is the timeline imagined? What skills do they need to start building now to accelerate the timeline, and ensure they’re ready when the time comes? Ensuring they agree with your assessment will help solidify your succession plan – and help engage them in a long-term vision with your company.

When done right, performance conversations can be engaging, constructive and informative for both parties involved in the conversation. While some planning and preparation is required, the return is much greater than the investment. If the end result is a better performing and more engaged team, any leader is sure to agree that these conversations will be well-worth the time spent and then some.

Employee Retention 101: Upskilling Your Workforce for the Future

Employee Retention 101: Upskilling Your Workforce for the Future

by | Dec 8, 2021 | Blog, Employees

In our first Employee Retention 101 article, we introduced the concept of talent enablement. In that article, we discussed the fact that many of the facets of talent enablement are wide-ranging, with many more details to uncover. In this second article, we will explore upskilling your workforce through leadership and professional development. This should be top on your list of employee retention strategies, both due to its likelihood to retain your employees, and because of its vitality to your organization.

Recent Gartner research found that 58% of the workforce will need new skill sets to continue doing their jobs successfully. Particularly in IT, finance and sales, skills are rapidly changing and quickly becoming obsolete; over 30% of the skills listed on an average 2017 job posting in those industries are no longer relevant.

Hiring alone cannot solve this skill gap; 75% of HR professionals note a shortage of skills in candidates applying for job openings. Training and developing your current workforce is the solution. This requires several things: an understanding of your current workforce, data to track your current workforce’s skill sets, and training and developmental opportunities to advance your existing team to fill your gaps. 

Luckily, providing these opportunities benefits both the employer and the employee.

 

Training and Development – Employee Benefits

The benefits that an employee who participates in employer-provided training and development opportunities surpass the obvious benefit of gaining new skills:

  • Per a 2019 study, 90% of employees agreed or strongly agreed that participation improved their job performance.
  • Employees that participate in training gain confidence in their skills to continue performing their jobs at a high level, and gain new skills to help prepare for advancement in the workplace.
  • Employees that participate in training are able to connect with peers in other parts of the organization, further increasing their engagement and sense of belonging.

 

Training and Development – Employer Benefits

Similarly, the benefits to the organization of having employees that actively engage in training and development are numerous:

  • Leaders often express concern that if they invest in employee training and development, their best talent will take those skills elsewhere. However, research shows otherwise; employee training reduces turnover, and incentivizes employees to stay.
  • Program-based training and development can prepare employees for a new role, which benefits the employee, but also benefits the employer as it builds a bench and fills higher-need roles with internal, trusted employees.
  • Training and development increases productivity as it improves the skills of the workforce and they become more efficient at fulfilling their job requirements.

 

How Do I Implement a Training and Development Program?

  1. Consider the needs of your talent pool; do not let yourself be “sold” by the best products on the market. Is your talent pool nearing retirement readiness? Consider training opportunities to diversify their skillset to encourage them to extend their working years in a new capacity. Is your talent pool relatively new to the workforce? Consider training opportunities that will help them learn leadership skills and business acumen.
  2. Do market research to consider the options available, and how the options align with the needs of your talent pool, as discussed in step one.
  3. Consider offering an array of training types; educate yourself on the types of education available, such as:
  • Micro-credentials: “Bite-sized” chunks of learning that can be pieced together into a curriculum, or taken separately and have some value on their own. Because of the “credential” associated, the employer has a record associated with the employee’s participation.
  • Digital badges: Visual representations of the micro-credential completion, used as validation of the record. Digital badges are portable and can follow the learner wherever he or she may go, outside of the organization, increasing the perceived benefit to the employee.
  • Individualized training: Modern learning management systems offer menus of training that employees can choose from to personalize their learning and development plans.
  • Gamification platforms: Technology again provides modern solutions for interactive training experiences in which employees have tailored and personalized learning delivered to them online.
  • Traditional, in-person learning and development: Some industries and companies will still lean on conferences and lunch-and-learns for a portion of their learning and development, though it is expected that technology will continue to take over larger shares of the training market.

 

Now, you’re set to implement (or upgrade) your organization’s training and development program to begin upskilling your employees to keep up with the demands of today’s workplace. Once up and running, your organization, its leaders and its employees will all benefit – not only in increased talent and skill, but in a more stable workforce with higher rates of retention.

Stick with us as we continue to explore avenues to increase your organization’s retention rate; the next article in our Employee Retention 101 series will discuss performance conversations that actually motivate employees to improve.