So you’re creative in marketing. You’re innovative in human resources. Your company probably has an impressive mission statement.
But do you have strong profits?
If not, are you effectively aligning business strategies with your HR department? The answer is likely no even if you have an HR mission statement.
The most-profitable companies develop an effective HR mission statement tied with business strategies.
Why? They inspire employees and motivate senior management to become stronger leaders.
Typically, even if companies have HR mission statements, they’re badly written and don’t manifest business strategies.
Characteristically, the statements are littered with contemporary buzz words and jargon.
Exemplary HR mission statements are businesslike – they give inspiring guidance by aligning HR initiatives with a company’s overall business objectives.
To develop a businesslike HR mission statement, here are six steps:
1. Budget time for blue-sky sessions. Such brainstorming requires a pen or pencil, a notepad and a change of scenery for creativity.
Ask each person who has HR duties to list the department’s goals, priorities and values.
Understanding that a team is only as strong as the weakest person, then ask each person to list their personal achievements that lead to profits.
Ask the persons to write how they spend their time each day. Why are they effective and why not?
Ask them to list the department’s overall achievements regarding business profit.
The next step is ask them to write what they’re ideal personal situation would be, and what should an HR mission statement look like to reach the company’s business goals.
2. Follow the same process with senior management. That would include all functions from marketing and sales to operations.
With an eye on strategies and objectives, they should then analyze the elements that stimulate profits.
3. Purify and refine your HR’s core values and drivers. Stay focused. Summarize them in a maximum of five specific, powerful sentences.
This will be your tentative HR mission statement.
4. Evaluate all of your HR initiatives. Decide which of them corroborate your tentative mission statement.
Determine which of them don’t. Scrap the activities that don’t lead to your company’s goals.
5. Hand out the mission statement to all managers and most-talented employees. Ask them to comment on it and to predict what they think will lead to strong profits.
6. Review the feedback and take action. Make the necessary changes for your new HR mission statement.
You should have a document that explains how your HR department will help your company reach its business goals, and specifies how the approach will quantify success.
So avoid the inane bucket list of HR tasks.
Instead, explain your HR’s responsibilities and how success will be competitively measured.
From the Coach’s Corner, here are editor’s picks:
5 Reasons for a Strategic Plan and its 6 Key Elements – Are you ready to compete? Is your company like many that need to rethink their strategic plans? Here are some tips in strategic-planning basics.
Productivity – 7 Steps to Build Performance Indicators — For performance-measurement in human-resource administration, the key is to design measurement systems to drive engagement, productivity and quality. Here’s how.
HR Management: 3 Values to Deliver Top Customer Service — The three values needed to achieve top customer service are easy-to-understand but arduous to achieve. But if your human resources program adopts and implements these values, you’ll achieve enviable organizational effectiveness – a high performance culture – for strong revenue.
HR Perceptions vs. Reality – There’s a Big Gap, Study — A big schism exists between what human resources professionals think they know about their workforce and what employees actually believe, according to a study. It was conducted by the HR firm, Kenexa. Its white paper is entitled, “Employee Attitudes and Engagement.”
Increase Your Business Value with 5 Basic BPO Strategies — For your company to achieve higher performance, you often need to enhance your business processes. In essence, this means turning your attention to business process optimization (BPO), which is a holistic approach. The benefits: With BPO, you’ll be able to evaluate and authenticate your existing practices and create new processes via imagined situations.
“An ounce of performance is worth pounds of promises.”
-Mae West
__________
