Today’s Strategic HR – Supporting the achievement of financial goals

Sound Human Resource management is as essential as financial management in today’s business environment. If employees are distracting each other, unmotivated, ill-trained or worse, ignorant of how their efforts either facilitate or detract from company goals, what’s the point of reporting financials and talking about fiscal responsibility?

Every company job must contribute to the bottom line. For HR this means certain competencies are essential:

  1. Extensive knowledge of the company’s main lines of business;
  2. Knowledge of finance, sales and marketing, efficiency strategies and operations;
  3. Knowledge of organizational strategic planning and setting strategic goals;
  4. Keen understanding of how division/department action plans support strategic goal achievement;
  5. Understanding the variety of talent activities that could support the achievement of company goals; and
  6. Development of HR strategic plans

HR’s mission has evolved 

Over the last 50 years HR’s mission has changed.  Gone are the days of “recruiting qualified candidates” or “training and staff development.”

  • 1960s to 80s – Recruitment, training and record keeping
  • 1980s to 2000 – Uninterrupted supply of qualified, well-trained employees
  • Today – Align comprehensive talent management with the company’s strategic plan to facilitate the achievement of company goals

For more HR mission statements www.missionstatements.com. 

All company strategic goals including purely technical goals such as finance or IT have numerous and related human resource implications. If a strategic goal is to increase company profitability, consider these human resource-related questions:

  1. Do you have the right competencies in the Finance office?
  2. Does the CFO have performance problems?
  3. What drives revenue? Can people make a difference? Which jobs have key influence in financial success?
  4. Are senior leaders held accountable (perf. eval.) for their share of revenue activities?
  5. Does the senior leadership team work collaboratively together toward financial ends?
  6. Do financial reports provide data that accurately reflect progress toward goals so that management can make sound decisions?
  7. Does every employee understand the importance of key financial indicators?
  8. Do senior leaders, supervisors, and front line job descriptions include financial end results?
  9. Does the compensation program reward good performance in finance?
  10. What employee-oriented barriers might interfere with revenue increases?
    • Are the barriers attitude-based (uncooperative, disgruntled or toxic employees)?
    • Are they competency-based? Performance-based?
    • Employee relations-based? Poor engagement, poor management?
    • Employee poor health or stress-related? Absenteeism, presenteeism?
    • Tools and materials-based?

And finally,

11. Does the corporate culture and values reinforce financial stewardship?

Think strategically and good luck!!

(c) BCSPublishing 2012 all rights reserved

Contact the author with questions or comments.
Bookmark the permalink.

Comments are closed