Why good HR is your best shot at strong business growth

Technology has transformed the HR role and that’s good news for business owners.

Digital programs can now take care of personnel administration, freeing the HR manager to work across the business on growth objectives. That means business owners and managers should expect a more strategic and longer-term focus from HR, says Oracle APAC Senior Director, HCM Strategy and Transformation, Andrew Lafontaine.

“You should be challenging HR on how they can help you deliver business growth,” he says.

Lafontaine says clients across the region report that innovation and great customer service are driving growth and they see these as the key differentiators between companies.

“Customers will pay a premium for great service or experience. Both innovation and service are led by people and it has become vitally important to manage your people in a strategic way.”

He says human resources managers need to collaborate by talking to line managers on how HR can help drive performance and provide insights and strategies for hiring, retaining and training staff.

HR used to be about payroll, training, and performance management, but Lafontaine says business can buy digital technologies to run these processes. The HR manager can use the technology for analysis, such as building knowledge on employee engagement and how capability can be aligned to the organisation’s needs and objectives.

They can identify the employee with the best sales or customer satisfaction rates and build a profile to use in recruiting new talent, or to design training to improve the skills of current staff.

The effectiveness of the training can then be measured in terms of increased sales or customer satisfaction, and capability gaps identified.

“I’m not saying everything is about training,” says Lafontaine. “There are other variables, but when you can monitor and measure you can start to close the gaps.”

HR can use the analysis to contribute to real business outcomes such as cutting cost or risk and increasing revenues and customer satisfaction.

“You can play in this space, but it is key to ensure you have the analytics in place to measure the impact you are having,” he says.

This collaborative form of HR is not aimed solely at managerial levels and can be used to foster employee engagement across the company. Lafontaine says it can mean receiving valuable feedback from the staffers who deal directly with customers “even if it’s not what you want to hear” and then working to constantly improve.

The evolution of human resources will be new to some owners and managers and Lafontaine urges them to open the discussion with their HR manager on how the function can contribute to innovation and growth, or “how can you help me deliver on my business outcomes?”

Starting the conversation:

• Do you have technology to free the HR manager from processes?
• What level of analysis does your technology provide?
• How can your organisation leverage that knowledge?
• How can HR contribute to targets?
• How can it help the company grow?
• How is HR working, or would like to work, with other parts of the business?

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