Historically, Human Resources departments was seen as an administrative team within an organization that focused on regulatory compliance and payroll. However, in today’s ever-evolving and increasingly people-focused business world, HR has become an integral part of any successful company’s leadership team.
The most successful companies have learned to strategically focus their HR assets in order to make the largest impact within their organization. In this post, we’ll explain just how to do this.
Specifically, we’ll discuss:
Big Picture HR Strategies vs. Tactical HR Elements
Keeping Your Internal HR Assets Focused on Big Picture Strategies
Outsourcing Your Tactical HR Elements
Choosing an Outsourced HR Partner
Big Picture HR Strategies vs. Tactical HR Elements
We’ll frame our recommendations in this post under two main categories: 1) Big Picture HR Strategies and 2) Tactical HR Elements.
Big picture HR strategies are the items that you hope to improve over time. Examples include company culture, talent acquisition, employee development, employee diversity, employee satisfaction, and employee retention.
Tactical HR elements are the day-to-day or week-to-week processes that must be carried out for standard HR operations. Examples include processing payroll, administering benefits, and storing employee data.
Keeping Your Internal HR Assets Focused on Big Picture HR Strategies
Successful companies generally keep their internal HR assets focused on big picture HR strategies. This means that HR leadership and supporting staff focus their day-to-day efforts on improving company culture, recruiting top talent, developing strategies to improve employee diversity, and other high-return areas.
These are the tasks that will lead to greater success for your company in the long run. Ultimately, HR is all about people. Where would your company be without the people who keep it running? While the tactical HR elements like payroll and benefits administration are critically important too, the work involved with their administration is much more technical and involves little to do with strategic human capital management.
For this reason, your internal HR assets should focus on those bigger picture HR strategies that will significantly impact the people who work for your business moving forward.
When you are looking to hire new HR team members, be sure you keep these considerations in mind. You might have a candidate who is an expert in administering payroll and benefits, but make sure the candidate can also think strategically about big picture HR efforts before you hire them. The ability to contribute to the big picture HR efforts will be much more valuable for your business in the long run.
Outsourcing Your Tactical HR Elements
Tactical HR elements such as payroll processing, benefits administration, and storing employee data are not overtly challenging – but implementing and managing systems to carry out those tasks does take time and resources.
Outsourced HR partners already have these systems in place, and they have mastered the use of these systems as they have implemented them with hundreds of businesses just like yours. If you choose a partner that is a great fit for your business, they should be able to get the systems up and running for you with a short onboarding timeline.
Although there are costs associated with hiring outsourced HR partners, it also saves you time and money by eliminating the need for you or your staff to implement and manage tactical HR systems.
The other significant benefit of working with an outsourced HR partner is that it can greatly reduce HR risk. By having an expert third party manage key HR processes on your behalf, you can greatly reduce the odds of making costly mistakes associated with violating HR laws or payroll processes. As a business owner, the last thing you want to deal with is a fine imposed by a local government agency or disgruntled employees with late paychecks.
Choosing an Outsourced HR Partner
Here are some questions you should ask yourself when you are researching different HR outsourcing solutions:
What will be the costs of working with this partner, both in the short term and the long term?
Does this partner have the technological capacity to grow as my business grows? In other words, can this partner adapt to fit my needs as my company expands to include more staff and potentially additional geographic locations?
Does the partner provide adequate training to my staff so that we can use their platforms or systems to the fullest extent possible?
Does this partner meet all legal compliance requirements, especially related to privacy and security of sensitive employee data?
Will this partner have the financial stability to ensure they stay in business over the long term?
Can I depend on this partner to properly address challenges and issues in a time-sensitive manner?
Key Takeaways
In the realm of HR administration, there are both big picture HR strategies as well as tactical HR elements.
Big picture HR strategies include things like improving company culture, acquiring new talent, employee retention, improving diversity efforts, and developing employees.
Tactical HR elements include things like processing payroll, benefits administration, and storing employee data.
Savvy business owners will understand the advantages to keeping internal HR assets focused on big picture HR strategies while outsourcing tactical HR elements. Some of these advantages include:
Increased efficiency of employee time and resources.
Reduced risk of litigation and fines for employers.
Increased focus on the big picture aspects of your business that will lead to greater success over time.
Finally, if you do decide to work with an outsourced HR partner, be sure to do your due diligence so that you pick the best fit for your business’s unique needs.
The key to a healthy, productive business is to build a team
of the right people and to make sure that employees are in the roles that fit
them the best.
Companies commonly make the mistake of hiring employees for
their technical skills and experience, rather than trying to assemble the best
team possible. It is most important to ensure that new hires are great cultural
fits so that they will contribute to the shared work of achieving your company
mission/vision and stay with the company long-term.
At the same time, you cannot build an effective team if you
promote the wrong people into the wrong positions. You need to have clear and
transparent performance evaluations and promotion policies so that you can
identify ideal candidates, help employees fill skill gaps, and maintain team
morale.
Both hiring the right people and putting them in the right
positions is necessary for a robust company culture, employee performance, and
retention. While the stakes are high, you can make a huge difference through a
few simple changes in your hiring and advancement practices. Let’s examine each
component in more detail and explore some simple steps you can take to make sure
that you are on the right track.
Hiring the Right People
Why Is Hiring the Right People So Important?
Why is it important to have the right people on your team?
The fact of the matter is that employees are the life blood of your company and
define your company’s success and its culture. If employees are a bad fit for
the company they can drive down their teammates’ productivity, damage team
cohesion, and cause retention problems.
On the other hand, being strategic in who works at your
company enables you to craft teams with an eye for culture, collaboration, and
productivity. This is why it is important to take a hard look at your hiring
procedures. Bringing on new employees is a huge commitment. You need to make
sure that your priorities in the hiring process match what you need to create
and maintain a team of the best people for your organization.
Hiring Mistakes to Avoid
Before we get into what you should be looking for when
hiring, let’s look at some common practices that cause companies to end up with
the wrong people.
All too often, companies hire for skills only. When they see
the candidate with the most experience and technical expertise, they fight hard
to bring them onboard whether or not the potential employee shows any interest
in the company mission/vision or culture. This is a critical mistake that is
easy to make; most employers do hire for skills and experience. However, nine
out of ten times the reason why they let people go is because they are a poor
cultural fit. Why not skip the middle step and only hire people who fit your
company culture?
Another trap that employers fall into is believing that
employees will change. They know that the candidate is not a good cultural fit,
but they believe that they will start buying into the company culture and
taking ownership over the mission/vision once they join the team. This is not
hard to do; after all, you believe in what you are doing and the culture that
you are fostering, so why wouldn’t the candidate believe too once they had
experienced life in your company? But the sad fact is that most employees
simply won’t change and become a good cultural fit.
Even when they find the perfect candidate, many employers
miss the opportunity to bring them on board because they aren’t willing to work
with the potential hire to make sure that the job meets their needs. Even if
you have a hard budget and cannot make salary accommodations, it is often worth
it to make compromises on vacation time, remote work, and other quality of life
benefits to bring the right people into your organization.
So, What Should You Do Instead?
The most important action to take to ensure that you have
the right people working at your company is to put culture at the center of
every step of the hiring process. Obviously, it is important to hire qualified
candidates. But hiring people who are great cultural fits will do wonders for
employee morale, retention rates, and productivity. Make it clear to candidates
what your company stands for and make sure that they will buy into and add to
your company culture.
You may be wary of scaring job seekers away by focusing too
much on company culture during the hiring process. Don’t be, you want to weed
out people who are opposed to your company culture. People who will buy into
the culture when they sign-on will appreciate your focus on culture and the
efforts you take to make sure they understand what it entails. If a candidate
believes in your company’s values but is put off by how seriously you take your
culture, then this probably isn’t the best person to bring on to your team.
Another factor to take into account is who you put in charge
of interviews and hiring decisions. You want a “true believer” in your culture
handling hiring. So, do not be afraid of bucking seniority to make sure the
right person is in the interview room. Every person at your organization that
touches the hiring process must strongly believe in the company mission/vision
and be a clear representation of your company’s culture.
Proper Promoting: Get
the Right People in the Right Seats
Why & What
As much as hiring the right people is important, it can be
even more important to promote the right people into the right positions.
Emphasize Performance Tracking and Communication
It is important to determine how employees are doing so that
you can be sure that you are promoting the right people. The more objective
your advancement process is, the easier it is to avoid nepotism and other toxic
promotion practices. Transparency not only allows you to find the right
candidates for each position, it also holds existing employees accountable and
empowers you to move people who are a poor fit for their current position.
You can drive accountability by tracking key performance
metrics, setting clear goals, and measuring success against those goals at
every level. By tracking performance in a clear and objective way, you can see
employee strengths and weaknesses and quickly identify candidates for
promotion.
Another important aspect to consider is feedback and
communication. Objective numbers and goal tracking is great when available, but
a lot of performance tracking and advancement procedures will still have to be
handled by employees’ managers. Don’t feel limited to annual reviews to
evaluate performance or give and solicit feedback. Try implementing quarterly
or even monthly reviews, encouraging feedback at weekly meetings and daily
standups, and asking employees regularly how they want to expand their responsibilities
and advance in the company. Not only will you have a better sense of which
employees are ready for promotion, you will be able to identify which
candidates are right for which positions based on their specific skills and
priorities by tracking their feedback and performance.
Also, letting employees know how they are doing, and what is
expected of them in order for them to be considered for promotion, helps job
satisfaction and employee retention. That means that the same strategies you
use to get the right people in the right roles can also keep them in those
positions.
How to Determine Who is Right for Which Position
Just as in your hiring decisions, it is important to promote
people who buy into your culture. Your managers are responsible for making sure
that their teams are run according to the company culture and that their team
members see how their work plays into the company mission and vision. No matter
how many perfect cultural fits you hire, you won’t see the payoff in an engaged,
mission-driven workforce if your managers are not the best cultural fits of
all.
When considering each specific position, it is also
important to promote the candidate who shows a natural intuition for the
challenges and expected results of the role.
Some candidates may be deserving of a promotion, and absolutely ready
for management, but not have the feel for a specific role. You want to promote
someone who ‘just gets it’ and does not need you to browbeat them with what is
expected of them. It can be helpful to consider candidates who have faced
similar challenges before, and can articulate clearly how their past
experiences relate to the position. Mostly, however, this is a less concrete
component of finding the right person; it is often something that you will be
able to feel out during the interview process.
Of course, you also need to promote people who have the
skills and time necessary to take on the new role. Top performers may be
overworked and unable to take on additional responsibilities. Other employees
might be the perfect fit for a role except for gap in their skills or
experience. In these cases it can be beneficial to figure out a lateral move
that will enable them to gain the necessary experience and continue to grow
within the company.
No matter how perfect someone is for a position on paper,
they will not be a good fit for the role if they do not really want it. You
want hungry managers who are eager to prove themselves, take initiative, and
drive their teams forward. People who can come up with out of the box solutions
and get the best results out of their team members because they genuinely want
to make a difference. Within limits, look for the people who have been chaffing
to change systems and strategies or who have started taking on some of the
responsibilities of the new position within their current role because they
care about seeing the job done.
Key Takeaways
We’ve covered a lot of ground about best hiring and
advancement practices. Here are some key concepts to take away from this
article:
Hire people who will make great additions to your team, not just who are the most qualified
Put company culture front-and-center in the hiring process
Track performance and encourage constant feedback to identify ideal candidates for each position
Promote strategically, again with an eye for culture but also looking at specific skills, experience, and mindsets necessary to tackle the given role
If you implement these principles in the way that you build
your teams, you will see significant improvements in company culture, team
cohesion, employee performance, and turnover rates. Your employees will be
engaged in their work and in the mission of your organization.
Your management team’s emotional intelligence level can make or break your ability to build a thriving business. Emotional intelligence, a.k.a. “EQ,” is someone’s ability to understand and harness the power of emotion to build strong relationships, foster trust, mitigate conflict, and more. Teams with a high EQ enjoy higher productivity, better morale, and improved employee retention. On the other hand, teams with a low EQ can suffer from poor work ethic, high turnover rates, and low motivation.
In today’s post we’ll explore emotional intelligence and why it’s important to your business’ success. We’ll also provide strategies you can leverage to improve your EQ. You’ll learn:
What is emotional intelligence?
Why is emotional intelligence important in the workplace?
Strategies to improve your emotional intelligence
What is Emotional Intelligence?
Emotional intelligence is the ability to identify and manage your emotions and the emotions of others. In his book, Working With Emotional Intelligence, Daniel Goleman outlines five categories of emotional intelligence including:
Self-awareness: understanding one’s own strengths and weaknesses, recognizing the impact of one’s actions on others, and receiving constructive criticism well.
Self-regulation: expressing one’s feelings with restraint and control.
Motivation: driven by one’s own ambition, resilience, and optimism.
Empathy: having the compassion and understanding to connect with others on an emotional level.
People skills: the ability to build rapport and trust with others.
Research on emotional intelligence by Harvard Business Review more broadly segments EQ into the areas of self-awareness, self-management, social awareness, and relationship management. Within each of these areas are several skills which allow for exceptional leadership in business. The graphic below overviews each of these areas and the competencies that fall within them.
Why is Emotional Intelligence Important (in General)
People with strong emotional intelligence are better able to regulate their own emotions and navigate the emotional responses of others. They reap many benefits including:
Recognizing and understanding their own emotional reactions
Managing, controlling, and adapting their own moods, reactions, and responses
Leveraging their emotions to motivate themselves, take action, commit, and work towards goals
Identifying the feelings of others, understanding their emotions, and using this information to relate to others more effectively
Building strong relationships, relating to others in social situations, leading, negotiating conflict, and working as part of a team
Why is Emotional Intelligence Important in the Workplace?
Emotional Intelligence plays a crucial role in business leaders’ ability to effectively manage and grow their business. Workplaces are, by nature, relationship-driven environments. They are places with a wide range of personalities, interests, and communication styles. Having a good EQ can help business owners better manage their workforce. Leaders with strong EQ reap many benefits including:
Being able to provide genuine feedback to employees
Fostering trust with employees and customers
Resolving conflict between team members
Setting realistic expectations and standards for your team
Constantly improving your management style
Research by the Center for Creative Leadership (CCL) found that lack of emotional intelligence is a leading cause of failure in executive positions. It identified three main reasons for failure: difficulty handling change, ineffective teamwork, and poor interpersonal relations. Additional research by Egon Zehnder International found that EQ was stronger at predicting executive success than IQ or job experience.
More generally speaking, research by The Carnegie Institute of Technology found that only 15% of financial success is attributed to technical skills. 85% of a typical person’s executive success is attributed to EQ skills such as the ability to communicate, negotiate, and lead. Research by TalentSmart found that 90% of top-performers have good emotional intelligence.
In business, trust is key. Building trust with employees and customers is important for business leaders. In fact, research by Daniel Kahneman found that people would rather do business with someone they trust, even if it means paying a higher cost. High EQ is critical to building genuine relationships founded on trust and mutual understanding.
On the flip side, poor emotional intelligence can lead to a toxic work environment. Bad EQ in the workplace can be seen in bullying, harassment, turnover, and demotivated staff. It can manifest as insensitivity, arrogance, aggression, and volatility. Whereas a leadership team with high EQ can build a flexible environment, low emotional intelligence can lead to detrimental inflexibility and rigidity. In order to build a good company culture, emotional intelligence is crucial.
How to Improve Emotional Intelligence
At its core, emotional intelligence is effective communication between the emotional and rational parts of the brain. Unlike IQ, which remains relatively constant throughout your lifetime, EQ is something you can actively work on and improve. Some ways to improve emotional intelligence include:
Observe your feelings: as business leaders, work is extremely demanding. It’s easy to become so over-worked that you suppress or ignore your emotions entirely. It’s important to recognize that ignoring your feelings can cause these emotions to become stronger and less controlled over time. Rather than getting caught up in the day-to-day, when you’re having an emotional reaction to a situation, take a minute to recognize and address your feelings. Intentionally taking time to recognize and address your feelings can help build up your emotional intelligence over time.
Respond instead of react: recognize the difference between responding and reacting. Reacting is a knee-jerk response driven by emotions. Responding is a conscious, intentional process driven by understanding your feelings and deciding how to behave.
Be humble and keep things in perspective: having realistic expectations of yourself and others is a key part of EQ. If you think you’re better than others, you won’t be able to intentionally recognize and work on your own faults. You may also set unrealistic expectations for others, leading to disappointment. Instead, remain humble while recognizing your own unique set of strengths.
As you intentionally integrate these strategies into the way you think, your brain will begin to build new pathways and thought processes. Over time, your brain will adjust to use new EQ-driven strategies in your day-to-day work. Improving your EQ takes effort but is critical for anyone in a leadership position.
Key Take-Aways
In today’s post we explored what emotional intelligence is, why it’s important, and how to improve it. Here are some key take-aways:
Emotional intelligence is made up of several components including self-awareness, motivation, and social skills
Emotional intelligence provides many benefits including stronger relationships, better control over feelings, and improved ability to resolve conflicts
In the workplace, EQ is a stronger indicator of business success than IQ or technical skills
Unlike IQ, EQ can be actively worked on and improved over time
There are several strategies you can use to better leverage EQ-driven thought processes
