Lakhasly

[ Classification : Internal Use ]

The HR career trajectory
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• Human resources has changed so much over the years. Just 10 years ago, there was a lot of hype about how HR can get a seat at the table. These days, we've got Chief Human Resources Officers, or CHROs at the table, along with Chief People Officers and Chiefs of People and Culture. And let's not forget, HR led the world's employers through a pandemic. We were the ones making sure people were safe and our employers were following the rules. We developed and implemented new ways to work at the drop of a hat and now we're the keepers of the future of work. Bottom line, now is a great time to build your career in HR by mapping out your career trajectory. There are many HR maturity models out there, but take a look at the one I created and put in the exercise files for you. Most HR professionals start off in the world of compliance. A small business realizes someone's got to be sure people are taking their lunch breaks and the office manager gets asked to do it. I got started that way, too. Although these days you can obtain a bachelor's and a master's degree in human resources, so we've definitely upped our game. At this beginning level, professionals tend to be focused on compliance as it relates to recruiting, compensation, and training. This type of HR is more tactical. Naturally, a person who's been recruiting and ensuring people get on-the-job training starts to wonder how to do it better. Now you've moved into solutions focused HR, where you start to learn that HR can proactively solve problems. Could you manage your workforce's personnel files better? Could you fine-tune your recruitment efforts? Could we better motivate employees to keep them from leaving? As you start to grow into answering these types of questions and gain credibility with leadership, you'll start moving into strategic HR, where you're building HR strategies alongside business strategies to help the business achieve its goals. Here's where you start wondering about metrics, company culture and employee experience, employee performance, equity and inclusion, and more. You see these things as strategies for organizational success. The last step on the maturity model is integrated HR. This is what CHROs and executive VPs of HR are doing. They aren't finding ways to support the company's strategies, they're helping build the company's strategies. They're forecasting future staffing needs as the executive team talks about market growth and also building equity and inclusion, training, and employer branding into that plan for market growth. Review the questions within each section of the HR Maturity Model I provided. you'll be able to quickly self-assess where you are in these four stages and where you'd like to go.

Defining strategic HR
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• Strategic HR is about aligning with the organization's overall strategy. It means being future oriented and, according to the Society for Human Resources Management, or SHRM, "Developing and implementing programs that solve business problems and directly contribute to major long-term business objectives." Becoming a strategic HR professional is part of the growth journey for people in our field, so welcome to this stage of growth. Let's compare two HR professionals, one more focused on tactics and solutions, the other more strategic, to see what's in store for you. Acme has a five year goal to become the industry leader in cog manufacturing. Their strategic plan includes reducing production costs by 10% and increasing sales by 30%. Our first professional is more transactional. When asked how she might help achieve these goals, she says she'll help hire new people as sales increase, and see if she can reduce costs by pulling back on office snacks and workplace socials sponsored by Acme. Our second is a strategic HR professional. So she suggests conducting a learning needs analysis for the sales team, as it's possible better selling could lead to more sales. From there, she can forecast if more salespeople are needed. She also suggests a workforce survey, because things like employee engagement, job satisfaction, and trust in leadership, increase productivity. Increased productivity could mean reduced costs in production. Lastly, she suggests a job analysis on manufacturing jobs to determine if production costs could be reduced by combining roles, eliminating some roles, or making other roles more productive. So our second HR professional is thinking more strategically and suggesting ways in which she can help the organization meet its goals, and even measure her success in doing so. Reducing production costs with her HR initiative is a fantastic, tangible HR strategy. Now she's a resource to the leadership team, and they'll come to rely on her to help build the business. If this sounds exciting to you, then you're in the right place. For now, take some time to think about your own HR duties. Are you thinking more like our first or second professional here? If it's the former, consider how you can move past functional and tactical duties to become a more strategic business partner to your leadership.

Competencies of strategic HR professionals
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• A good place to start in your journeys being more strategic is to understand the competencies required for being successful. SHRM, the leading and global professional association for HR professionals has defined nine competencies you need. As they describe it, "The SHRM Competency Model identifies what it takes to be a successful HR professional across the performance continuum, around the globe and across all career levels, job roles and job functions. I'm going to review them here in no particular order as they relate to strategic HR specifically. First is communication. Feedback, facilitation, persuasion and diplomacy. You need this competency to talk your leadership team into the ideas you have related to helping them meet their strategic goals for the company. No matter the size of your company, you absolutely have to be effective in thinking and communicating in our diverse world through cultural awareness, and open mind and adaptability. Relationship management is about networking, credibility, teamwork, and excellent service for your customers, the employees. You won't be able to get much done if they don't see you as credible, and focused on their needs. Of course you also have to be ethical, and able to think critically, and you can implement your strategic plans without HR expertise, which means understanding what technology is available to you. How to engage in workforce planning, and delivering customized solutions to solve the business' problems. Being strategic is also going to require strong business acumen so you can speak with confidence about the business as a whole, including operations, logistics, sales, marketing and metrics. Along with speaking with confidence about the business, you'll need to demonstrate strong leadership such as influencing others. Being mission-driven and results-oriented. In order for leaders to listen, and buy into your ideas, you have to meet them where they're at, and instill confidence in them, and the workforce that you can lead the initiatives you're proposing. Last but not least, on the heads of all strategic HR professionals is a consulting hat. Approaching your role as a consultant whose role is to provide guidance through coaching and problem-solving will help you gain trust, and see the organizational problems from a different perspective. Wow, that was a lot. Not to worry. There's plenty online from SHRM regarding these competencies, so you can learn more. They also have an assessment you can take for free to understand where you are and what you need to work on. You can build your competencies from there.

Tying HR to organizational mission and values
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• Strategic HR increases an organization's ability to achieve its vision, mission and strategic objectives. So you've got to connect your own activities to them as well. Let's say you work for a small tech firm who creates apps focused on health and nutrition, and the organization's vision statement is to make lives better. So your HR vision must be to make lives better for your employees. Perhaps you do that with your employee wellbeing initiatives, flexible work, competitive vacation time and stellar learning opportunities. All things that make employee lives better. And as your workforce's lives are better, they'll put that positive energy into making customer lives better. If our firm's mission is to promote a healthy lifestyle through a wide range of well designed apps, it must also be your mission to promote a healthy lifestyle internally. Perhaps that includes a yoga and exercise room, healthy food in the cafeteria and making a nutritionist available as a benefit. Finally, review your organization's core values. If one involves excellent customer service, then your core value in HR is providing excellent customer service to employees. If another is innovation, you should be doing some innovative HR stuff. So review your organization's vision, mission and core values, and ask yourself how you can apply them to yourself and your HR responsibilities. Where are you excelling and what are the opportunities for improvement? Also ask yourself what activities you're working on that help the organization itself meet its vision and mission, and where you are lacking. Where could you be stepping in to drive the organization towards its goals? In addition to connecting to the vision and mission, you should also focus on demonstrating return on investment or ROI for your activities. This means that the investment in something has a return greater than the investment itself. It either makes money or saves money. Take training, for example. If your company loses 30% of customers within the first three months of signing on, your company is also losing money, let's say $200,000 in revenue. Convince the CEO to spend $10,000 on customer service training, save 1/2 of those customers, and keep $100,000 in revenue. The cost of training was 10,000 and the return on that investment was 90,000, or 100,000 minus the cost of the training. So I also want you to start looking at how you can prove the cost of your ideas and activities is either saving money or earning money. Moving forward, make this a regular practice.

Audits and assessments
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• Maya Angelou's got a famous quote. "You can't really know where you're going "until you know where you've been." And it definitely applies to strategic HR. Before you develop any sort of strategic plan, it's important to assess what's happening so you can build from there. An HR audit could be really useful for you if you're new in an organization or new to your role, if you're building an HR program from the ground up, or if it's been a while since anyone did it. There are four types of HR audits, including compliance, which focuses on whether your policies and practices are compliant with the law, or functional, which focuses on a specific area, such as payroll, recruiting, onboarding, or training. A best practices audit focuses on competitive advantage or how well you're living up to HR industry best practices. If our industry is saying you should be using metrics to make decisions, you'll want to audit what metrics you have, whether they're correct, and what else you should be measuring. A strategic audit is focused on strengths and weaknesses of your HR practices. One option here is to send an HR customer service survey out to your workforce. Let them tell you what's working and not from their end. So which type of audit should you run? Well, there's a lot to consider. Are there functions that have been getting ignored? Perhaps you should start there. Have you been feeling like your organization's behind the curve? Perhaps you want to dig into best practices. There really isn't a right answer. All of the audits are useful. Beyond your world of HR, another possible step is a climate assessment. This is a snapshot in time of your organization's culture, including employee engagement, job satisfaction, inclusivity, trust in leadership, internal communication effectiveness, and burnout. No matter what you do, I've got some tips for you. The main one is to be clear on your research question. If your research question is how do employees view the culture? Then an employee engagement survey may not be the right avenue if it's only measuring engagement. Also be transparent with your workforce. Your compliance audit probably doesn't include them, but if your best practices audit is going to include them in some way, be sure you've communicated what you're doing and why and also that they'll get information about the results. Piggybacking on that, if your workforce knows you're auditing and assessing, then they'll also want to see some change. So don't run a climate assessment until you're sure you're going to have the resources and permission to do something about the results. Lastly, workforce surveys are better done from outside the organization. People are more honest if they know their results truly can't be traced by you. So have a think on where you might get started and get started.

Developing an HR strategic plan
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• Most businesses have a strategic plan focused on growth, marketing, customers, and operations. And you should have a plan ensuring there's adequate people with the right skills, the right behaviors, and the right attitudes to achieve the company's strategic plan. In other words, a strategic HR plan lays out how the HR function will support the goals and strategies of the organization. And it outlines the gaps between the present and future goals. Once you've got the company's plan in your inbox and can answer the question, where's the organization going? You can start asking things like, what do we need to get there? And do we have those skills and people here already? A needs assessment can help. It's the process of identifying what skills are needed to achieve the future goals, who has them, and where the gaps are. Conduct some research by reviewing job descriptions, interviewing employees and their managers, observing work, and conducting a SWOT analysis. Once you know what you need and where the gaps are, then you can answer a fourth question, how do we address those gaps? You've got four options to include in your HR strategic plan. Provide training to current employees, recruit new employees, outsource, or restructure. Your plan might also include important areas like gaining a more diverse workforce, increasing employee benefits, developing more work life balance, data protection, reward systems, performance management, and more. All of these things can be tied to the organization's strategy and ROI can be shown. The point is that instead of doing HR administratively and instead of focusing on putting out HR fires, a strategic plan allows you to grow HR along the side the business, and help the business achieve its goals. I also just want to say that leaders often create strategic plans without input from HR. If that's the case in your organization, clearly articulate the common people themes behind the plan your leaders created and address employee engagement and motivation issues the plan brings to light. Then you can create a strategic plan around those issues. This will help you earn a coveted seat at the table. Your action step here is to get a hold of your company's strategic plan and get started on answering the questions that we discussed.

A strategic recruiting and onboarding approach
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• The cost of turnover is expensive. Estimates, vary. Losing an employee will cost your company between 50 and 150% of that position's annual salary. My team just analyzed the cost of 16 employee exits for one of our clients and found that at the bare minimum, these exits had cost 200,000 over a year in lost productivity. If we'd use that 50% salary thing, the number is a whole lot more. So finding the right people is a strategic move and "let's get a warm body in here quick" is not. Beyond hiring for the competencies needed for upcoming roles, do some market research to understand what your competitors are paying, how they're recruiting, and their employer brand. Your plan should also address challenges you've been facing in recruiting and retention and how you'll overcome them. You'll want to get laser focused on exactly who you need then figure out where they are and how you'll attract them. It might be through the latest social media craze or through building an employer brand that showcases your commitment to underrepresented groups. Also don't use your job description. Can you imagine if Apple use their users manual to entice people to buy their latest gadget? They don't do it, and you shouldn't either. Instead of seeking a new receptionist, try, we're seeking a happy face, great personality, and courageous spirit to be the face of our company when clients walk through the door. Who would you rather work for? All of this is referring to another part of your plan, the candidate experience. If you think of candidates like potential customers, every interaction should entice them to buy. What's the current candidate experience and how can you make it better? For those who get hired, The VIP candidate experience turns into a VIP onboarding experience. Onboarding is a six-month process focused on integrating new employees socially and culturally. And of course it involves job training too. I joke because new hires indeed want to understand the people stuff more than the job stuff. Nuances like whether meetings start on time or late, acceptable response time for emails, and whether people socialize outside of work are top of mind for your new hires. Minimize the anxiety being in unknown territory creates by providing an agenda for at least the first few weeks, involving as many people as you can, and ensuring they're getting regular positive and constructive feedback. Be sure their workstation is set up whether at home or on site. And remind employees that a new hire is something to celebrate, not to be annoyed at when they take up time for training. To get started, review the exercise files for a template recruiting strategy, sample onboarding agenda a new hire might receive, a list of fun onboarding ideas and what my team and I call the ultimate onboarding checklist.

A strategic performance development and management approach
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• Performance management is the systematic process of improving the performance of your people So they can collectively get the organization to its goals. If one goal is to increase sales by 10%, for example, you've got to ensure the organization has the resources available to achieve it. A strategic HR partner understands performance management Isn't just focused on individual performance. It's also focused on how the organization helps or hinders its workforce. Does the sales team know what's expected of them? Are they told when they're not meeting expectations and rewarded when they are And do they have the right training? From an organizational perspective, Does the sales team need more people or more leads, Are processes efficient, and can the current leader lead the team to this goal? Good HR strategists also look at manager capabilities. Unfortunately, I find this group is often overlooked. I see time and again that managers desperately need training on how to do performance management. They need to be looking at the individual and the context, coaching to address poor performance and leaning on strengths, setting goals, providing regular informal feedback, and rewarding success. I put a model in the exercise files for you. Feel free to pull it up for this next part. The first step is understanding how job competencies fit into the organizational vision and strategic goals. Using my own firm as an example, one of my goals is to scale up, so I need more team members to have competencies related to delivering our workforce surveys. From there, work with your managers to define performance goals and standards of behavior. I'm training and coaching two team members in delivering surveys. So we've defined performance goals, which also means we've defined learning goals. Goals may be ongoing, such as obtaining a customer satisfaction score of 95 or above or more short-term, such as completing a project. Goals might also be focused on how to behave, such as ensuring respect at all times. All goals should be SMART goals, which means they are specific, measurable, attainable, but challenging, relevant, and timely. Once your managers have worked with their employees to set their individual and departmental goals, they become coaches. Managers should also be meeting regularly to provide feedback. It can be informal check-ins or some companies require a weekly touch base, for example. The last step in the cycle is rewards or discipline. Rewards could be a simple shout-out in a meeting up to something more substantial. And if your managers have been trained properly, they're only resorting to discipline after some coaching has occurred. So take a look at your company's strategic plan and determine how your current performance system helps achieve the goals and where it's lacking. From there, you can add your improvements into your strategic HR plan.
  A strategic learning and growth approach
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• We all know employees love to learn and grow, and hopefully your managers are working with employees to help them achieve their personal growth goals as part of performance management. When it comes to department or company-wide training though, many organizations turn to training before knowing whether lack of knowledge is the problem. As a strategic HR professional, you know it's important to look at that first. So you can demonstrate ROI, and business results of a training initiative. That's how you'll influence leaders to allocate resources to learning, and keep them from using training as a fix-all approach. This is where a needs assessment comes in. Gather data through interviews, surveys, or observation. Then you can analyze the data to understand what the right solution is. Let's say your customer service center is struggling to meet a quota of calls each day. Before jumping to training, you learn through your needs assessment that conversations are longer than anticipated because clients need a better web portal to log into their accounts. Or maybe the script needs to change. Or the software is outdated. Or the required documentation takes too long. All of this highlights why you don't want to jump straight into training without having a better understanding of the situation. Now you can propose the right solutions. Maybe it's training, but maybe not. If you do engage in training, try to measure its success. One popular option to do that is the Kirkpatrick Model. It has four levels. Reaction. Learning. Behavior. And results. At level one, you're measuring reactions to the content, and the trainer. If you've ever filled out an evaluation form at the end of any kind of workshop, that was level one. At level two, you're measuring the degree to which learners acquired the knowledge or skills you intended them to acquire. You're exams in school were measuring level two learning. At level three, you're measuring behavior change. To what degree did the learners apply the information? Did their behavior change as a result of the learning event? And at level four, you're measuring the degree to which targeted outcomes occur as a result of the learning event. Let's say your boss asked you to take this course so that you could in-fact be a strategic partner in growing the business. For level one, you've got the opportunity to fill out an evaluation. And for level two, you've been engaged in assessment questions throughout. When you're done with the course, you develop a strategic HR plan focused on recruiting. I've influenced your behavior, and that's level three. Then you implement your plan, and recruit candidates who are more qualified and stay longer than before. And you've saved the organization in turnover costs, and that's level four. In the exercise files for this course, you'll find Kirkpatrick's Model, a worksheet to help you measure your current training programs with that model, and a sample level one training evaluation form.
  A strategic employee experience and organizational culture approach
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• Culture is the way organizational members think, act, and understand the world around them. All of the terms we hear these days, employee experience, engagement, employer branding, diversity, equity, and inclusion, these are all under the umbrella of culture. Culture exists whether you focus on it or not. So why not focus on it? Doing so will reduce turnover, increase production, and contribute to meeting organizational strategies. The place to start is with your vision, mission, and values. Is your vision and mission communicated to your workforce? Do they know and live the core values? You might be wondering how that ties into organizational strategy. If one of your company's strategic goals is to increase market share, then you can tie diversity, equity, and inclusion to that as DEI can help you achieve that goal. So your strategic HR plan will include recruiting more diverse candidates and ensuring they feel included through flexible work options, employee resource groups, and other initiatives. You would also need to ensure managers are trained on proactively creating a respectful and inclusive workplace in their teams and that everyone else knows how to intervene when they witness bad behavior. In addition to training, you can hold people accountable to this core value by adding them to your performance management system. Managers should be measured, for example, on their ability to engage in inclusive behaviors, communicate with diverse team members, and create psychological safety. Rewards programs and other HR initiatives should also tie to core values, including your policy handbook, job postings, and communication about everything from open enrollment to the holiday party. In sticking with our core value of DEI, for you, this means ensuring equity and rewards in compensation and that you have diverse benefits for your diverse workforce. Also consider your work environment. Does it reflect a diverse set of people, beliefs, and values? If people are working remotely, does it account for the variety of needs among your workforce? A great next step is to review the company's strategic plan through the lens of your company's core values and determine where your HR initiatives can boost those goals. You may need to sell your ideas to leadership, so try to back up your ideas with research. There's a ton of research online that shows a diverse workforce does indeed help increase market share. For example, one Harvard Business Review article reports that firms with a diverse workforce who have diverse experiences are 45% more likely to report that their firm's market share grew over the previous year when compared to firms who don't have a diverse workforce. In my line of work, I see all too often that companies don't pay attention to culture and that it drags them down. They end up spending time and money on fixing the toxic culture that emerged and addressing the turnover it brings rather than spending time and money on meeting their goals.

A strategic DIBs approach to human resources
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• During the Black Lives Matter movement of 2020, many leaders proclaimed that they supported people of color and would take action to eradicate systemic racism. It's impossible to track how many of them actually did, and the bottom line is we still have a long way to go nonetheless. Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Behavior initiatives, or DIBs, is not only the right thing to do, it's a strategic move that increases the bottom line. For example, Boston Consulting Group found companies that have more diverse management teams have 19% higher revenue due to innovation. McKinsey and Company reports that organizations with ethnic and culturally diverse leadership are 33% more likely to outperform their peers. So where do you begin? Start by reviewing the programs you have going now. If you already have an employee engagement program for example, is it addressing things like psychological safety and feelings of being included? Can you expand that program to include DIBs, or do they need to stand on their own? I suggest this as a first step, because many of the concepts will intertwine. Psychological safety is a phrase often discussed under the umbrella of DIBs, but employees can't be engaged if they aren't feeling psychologically safe. I just don't want you to lose sight of the fact that all of your programs for humans have crossover. Now that you have an idea of what's already being addressed in other programs, it's time to dig into the business case for DIBs specifically and gain leadership's commitment. Think about what stakeholders should be included, what key objectives DIBs supports, and what changes are needed to meet those objectives. Then be prepared to describe the specific actions you'd like to take first to your leaders, which I suspect will be a survey of your workforce to uncover where you are and where you need to go. I suggest hiring an outside consultant if you can, people are way more honest when they truly believe their answers won't be used against them. Once you have some data, you can build your DIBs vision and strategy. Your strategy will absolutely need to include one goal around overarching organizational culture including psychological safety and relationships. I'm sure other goals will focus on recruiting, hiring, and developing a diverse workforce as well as communication, such as successes and failures of the DIBs program and marketing and employer branding around DIBs. A DIBs program is a huge undertaking, but there are plenty of resources and consultants out there to help. Start by checking out SHRM's website for more tips on developing and implementing a strategic DIBs initiative. FDIC also published their 2021 to 2023 plan, and it's a great example of the DIBs plan. There's a lot of work to be done in this arena. I'm excited for you to get started.

A strategic well-being and flexible work approach
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• Employee wellness programs are the right thing to do. Employers love to highlight their green initiatives or their social responsibility, but giving employees a place to grow and thrive is paramount. What goes on at work definitely influences how people feel and act outside of work, out in your community. And bonus business case for the organization, if employees are doing well mentally, physically, spiritually and intellectually, they'll outperform your competitor's employees who aren't doing so well in these areas. That's because wellness programs reduce burnout and absenteeism and increase productivity and innovation. Of course, this directly impacts the organization's ability to meet its goals. And employees expect much more than a paycheck in exchange for their hard work and ideas. They want flexible work and work-life balance. They want to feel included and valued and that they're making a difference in the world. So a wellness program will help you recruit and retain talent. You might have already guessed that the first step is to get leadership support. You don't want to make any promises or conduct an assessment if leaders aren't going to allow you to make change. Once you have their support, run an assessment to determine where employees are with stress levels, emotional wellbeing, physical health, the workplace environment and more. I shared some survey questions for you in the exercise files. If you're doing other types of assessments or surveys already, you could start by reviewing those results to glean what you can about employee wellness. Once you understand what your employees need and want, you can work on building your strategic plan. I recommend doing so with a wellness committee made up of employees and managers from a variety of levels and departments. This will ensure you're tackling wellness in a way that positively impacts all of the variety of people in your workplace. As you create your plan, of course you'll consider what programs to implement, but also how you'll integrate wellness into everything you do as an organization. Figure out how you'll communicate about the program to new hires, how you'll encourage employee participation, how you'll make it a part of your employer branding and how it can increase employee engagement. My last tip for you is to be sure you're measuring the success of your program. You're going to want to show leaders the ROI of your initiatives. So don't go in and start announcing team wellness walks every day at lunch. Be strategic and start by gathering data you have from previous surveys to start getting an idea of where you're at. From there, you can build a business case for your leaders to engage in a full fledged and strategic wellness program.

Software, apps, and metrics
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• It's hard to be strategic if you can't be efficient, understand metrics, or measure success of your initiatives. And if truth be told, leaders are demanding analytics from all parts of the business because they can. Technology provides the ability to measure things we've never measured before in ways we've never measured them. And it's only getting worse, or better depending on who you ask. One tool you absolutely need is a Human Resources Information System or HRIS. A basic version will help you track employee data, time off, and HR reports. Many also include an Applicant Tracking System or ATS, for your recruiting, and also onboarding and performance management tools, peer reviews, employee self-service portals, payroll, and more. You might also be able to locate one with a Learning Management System or LMS that tracks views of training videos and documents. HRISs can also include metrics based on the employee life cycle. Recruiting metrics include things like time to fill, source of hires, and time to close, or time between an offer letter being sent and being signed. You can also collect data on your onboarding, asking new hires to self-assess how they're doing, asking managers to rate how they're doing, and measuring correlations between onboarding programs and retention. Employee growth and productivity metrics include absence rate, promotion rate, or efficiency. For example, you might identify that one department has more absences than other departments or a trend of clocking in later and leaving earlier so you can dig into finding out why and what needs to change. Retention metrics are also important. Examples include average tenure, average tenure based on position or department, voluntary resignation versus terminations, or turnover rate of high versus low potentials. Through surveys, which some HRISs provide, you can also uncover levels of employee engagement and the net promoter score or NPS. NPS is simply asking people to rate how likely they are to recommend a friend to work at your company. You might also measure your own HR initiatives and your own efficiency through metrics like time to accomplish certain tasks, costs per employee for benefits programs, diversity in your leadership in your workplace, revenue per employee, cost per employee grievance, HR expense per employee, and so much more. Your next step might be a conversation with your leadership team to find out what types of metrics they might be interested in And that doing some research to locate which HRIS will help you get to that information. Many of your desired metrics may not be in the HRIS system however, and could require putting pen to paper, or let's face it, fingers to keyboard.

A strategic benefits and compensation approach
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• There are many research studies on what drives employee engagement. Interestingly enough, compensation is not usually at the top of the list. But as an employee yourself, you know that people do care about how much they're paid. You also know the market can fluctuate like crazy. And sometimes compensation and benefits is at the center of recruiting and keeping talent. You could go online and see what the average worker in your industry is paid, but that won't drive organizational performance and it's not strategic. So let's look at some other options for setting up employee compensation. You might start by surveying employees to find out what they want. Do they want some money for daycare? Or would they rather get a few more vacation days each year? Do they want a 401k or a health club membership? There are so, so many options outside of compensation to keep employees excited and engaged. Do some internet research and get creative. Also work with your leaders to develop a compensation philosophy. Once you know what employees are looking for, you can develop some plans around it. Determine how you want to use pay to attract and keep talent, motivate employees, reward high performers, ensure equity, and achieve organizational goals. One philosophy is called pay for performance, which means people are paid when they accomplish goals. Or employees are promised more pay for better performance. One way to do this is through KPIs, or key performance indicators. Let's say a goal for your project manager includes rearranging some processes to make them more efficient. When the project is completed, perhaps they receive a bonus. Even more of a bonus if they can improve the ROI on their new processes. If you do this, you have to be sure that KPIs are within the employees control and are achievable. Another philosophy is paying for staying. You might offer a one time bonus at certain yearly marks or a higher annual percent increase when employees reach certain anniversaries. There are a lot of options out there, so do your research. Be sure pay is fair and equitable, and that it will be perceived by employees that way. Also ensure your pay structure is compliant with federal and state laws, and that it can be explained with simplicity. If it gets too complicated, you'll turn employees and potential new recruits off. So review your compensation, benefits and rewards, to determine where you're at now and where to go. In fact, I'd recommend a compensation audit by an outside professional who can look at the data without bias. Unfortunately, our biases do get in the way and audits often reveal unfairness that can be corrected.