In HR, the first friend you want to make is Finance, because every good HR knows that without talking the much needed financial lingo (i.e. the EBIT and the DAs; the bad debt opportunities that will zing up your profit and bottom line; and all the cost saving and efficiency measures you can think of) they will never buy into your drive to give your company culture a little face lift, no matter how many fluffy metrics you can show them. They don’t care about your engagement scores – they care about how those engagement scores will increase your shareholder value. Nothing personal, but they need the black and white. Now that finance knows your main aim is focusing on the overall strategic business results, you can move into deploying your tactical and operational strategies. Targeting your culture and your people and doing it consistently and in ways they see coming because you know your biggest chance of success is communicating and over-communicating with all your stakeholders. Targeting your quick wins and fast actions. Your “HR Value Chain” and all the other snazzy words they teach you in business school that sound awesome but don’t mean anything without results to back them up. Results like, driving an engagement and retention strategy to result in reducing attrition by 43% and being the top 5 most engaged entities in the world; standardizing HR processes to result in over AED2.2M annually in savings; and designing a strategic recruitment strategy to result in a 30% ROI. So, if you’re the kind of employer looking for someone to change your company culture, don’t look for the audit focused HR who will come in to tick all the fancy buzzword boxes and not add any impact. Look for the HR who knows the real customer is the employee, and who knows the real impact and results come in challenging the status quo and delivering outstanding customer service.
Chief Human Resources Officer at Future Pipe Industries
Psychology, Cognitive Psychology and Psycholinguistics