Greetings!
Today's Wall Street Journal features an article on using strategic investment and targeted cost-cutting to win during a recession. Many of you are in the midst of planning and budgeting -- a difficult task in a turbulent economic environment. This month I'm talking about a different approach to making HR investments and creating and demonstrating business-driven HR results.
Best regards,
Edith
Edith Onderick-Harvey
President |
The Problem
A turbulent economy. Annual planning and budgeting. Explaining the business impact of human capital expenditures.
Solution
Drive human capital management decisions the way market research drives product development decisions. Provide information, analysis and decision models.
A buzz in the HR community is beginning around "evidence-based HR", an approach that drives HR decision-making by predicting and assessing the impact various strategies have on business results.
We intuitively understand the impact of human capital on corporate success. Most of us have some measures to understand the effectiveness and efficiency of our HR initiatives. As we look at the difficult economic times facing our companies, now is the time to demonstrate HR impact with hard evidence. We need to not only look back at our past HR effectiveness but to predict our future HR impact.
John Gibbons, Sr. Research Advisor in Management Excellence for The Conference Board defines evidence-based HR this way:
"Evidence-Based HR focuses on the business strategy. Evidence-based practitioners start with the business's key financial and operational measures, and use a rigorous approach to identify their human capital strategies that drive these key outcomes. It applies a high standard for "evidence". The evidence-based approach is a rigorous approach, with the goal of identifying causal relationships."
Effective finance and marketing functions already demonstrate how they drive business success. Firms often look to them to provide information about how to maximize revenues and contain costs, particularly during tough financial times. Utilizing decision-making processes that use information gathering, analysis and decision models, they are helping drive the investment conversation in the C-suite.
Human Resources needs to continue to become a more integral part of that conversation. You tackle issues related to optimizing employee productivity, increasing engagement and retaining high-quality talent - which all contribute to the bottom line. These contributions need to be translated to show business impact. Evidence-based HR does that for you in a way that resonates with bottom-line driven executives.
I've recently worked with Harvard University's HR department to drive HR development and the redesign of their employment function using an evidence-based approach. By analyzing information from focus groups and surveys, we were able to more strategically align HR to client needs. You can find a more detailed description of this project by accessing an excerpt from the Conference Board Report "Evidence-based HR in Action." Other leading companies, like Capital One and Hewlett Packard are integrating evidence-based practices to their human capital management practices and are also featured in the full Conference Board report.
To discuss how evidence-based HR can help you in this tough economy, call me at 978.475.8424 or send an email to edith@change-dynamics-consulting.com.
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