By Joyce Maroney

Today’s challenging economic climate creates an opportunity for human resource professionals to significantly increase their value to their organizations. How?

Because their role provides them with a broad and employee-centered view of the business, strategic-thinking HR professionals have a unique opportunity to provide senior management with deep insights into what is happening across their organizations. These insights, coupled with the benefits of HR technology, can help HR professionals provide information that is highly valued by C-level executives.

“The degree to which you are strategic is measured by the impact you have beyond your department,” says Dr. John Sullivan, author of “Marketing HR to Your CEO.” “The act of being strategic requires identifying, forecasting, and solving business problems, not HR problems.”

To make an impact on business results, HR professionals should proactively engage with executives to learn about their long-term vision for the organization and then determine how they can make contributions in areas that are of strategic importance to these key decision-makers. For many CEOs, four items rise to the top of their list of important issues facing their organization:

•       Customer service
•       Resource management
•       Improved decision-making
•       Regulatory compliance

Utilizing technology, HR professionals can help CEOs address these key business issues, and increase their own value in the process.

Skilled customer service

Frontline employees are often the “face” or “voice” of a business, underscoring the importance of hiring the right employees for these positions. Having well-skilled customer service employees in place helps a company provide better service, which can be a strategic differentiator. Talent acquisition and candidate assessment technologies assist HR executives and hiring managers in quickly sourcing and accurately assessing the candidate pool to identify appropriate hires for frontline and other positions. Metrics provided by these systems aid staff in analyzing applicant quantity and quality for particular positions, enabling them to refine position descriptions and applicant sourcing strategies to improve the hiring process.

Once new employees are hired, onboarding technology can help them become engaged and productive more quickly. Technologies that assist with onboarding run the gamut from those that expedite the processing of new hire paperwork to robust distance learning platforms that help employees become proficient at the job more quickly. Keeping employees engaged with an organization builds their loyalty, increases their tenure, and reduces the costs associated with replacing employees. Social media tools such as Facebook and LinkedIn can also be used to engage employees, support a company’s employment brand, or extend the employment brand by marketing the company to prospective employees.

In retail, hospitality, and other service industries, having too few employees on the floor may negatively impact customer service. Workforce analytics and scheduling applications enable organizations to analyze historical labor and sales data to accurately predict customer volume and align the workforce needed to meet the demand.

Effective resource management

A tight economy necessitates close scrutiny of an organization’s operating expenses. One way to boost revenues and control costs is to make the best use of an organization’s human resources. Using technology, HR professionals and managers are able to mine workforce data to seek ways to maximize employee productivity while minimizing labor costs, estimated to be 36 percent of revenues in a recent study by Mercer Human Resources and CFO Research Services.

Workforce analytics software allows a company to analyze business performance information alongside workforce performance data to reveal counterproductive trends and identify root causes and opportunities for improved resource management. This analysis of workforce performance information can identify labor cost as a percentage of sales; sales per labor hour; and productivity per shift, department, day of the week, month, or region, to outline just a few of the possible lines of inquiry.

In a manufacturing setting, for example, actual labor cost per unit can be evaluated relative to expected margins. Labor cost overages may reveal excessive overtime costs during a particular shift, which may suggest a need for scheduling or staffing modifications. By utilizing scheduling software in tandem with workforce analytics, managers—with the encouragement of HR professionals—can anticipate staffing needs and ensure that the right number of employees with the right skills are scheduled for each shift.

Performance management systems bring important discipline to the practice of tracking and managing employee performance, and provide hard data that help managers and C-level executives identify opportunities for better resource management. These systems not only help managers deliver feedback to employees and track performance over time, they also provide a means of identifying employees who are ready and available for new opportunities.

Improved decision-making

Technologies that apply a consistent set of rules to employee-related decisions help managers drive more objective and productive outcomes. Talent management technology can be used in candidate screening to identify prospective employees who will be most productive in specific positions.

In industries such as healthcare, matching employees’ specific skill sets or certifications to particular job requirements is critical. Scheduling software allows shift supervisors to objectively match employees to the skill sets needed, department by department and shift by shift, while keeping track of each employee’s hours to avoid unnecessary overtime costs. An automated scheduling system can incorporate union or other organization-specific rules to create a fair workforce-planning process.

Thorough regulatory compliance

HR professionals can educate C-level executives on the value of workforce management technology in helping an organization mitigate compliance risk and establish defensible audit trails. Automated technologies that manage a process consistently, meet required competencies, and are blind to gender, race, disability, and age can support organizations in being compliant with Equal Opportunity Employment Commission (EEOC) requirements. During the hiring process, for example, an online application process can ensure that all applicants considered for a position measure up to the same criteria before being selected.

Automated leave and attendance applications also make sure leave and attendance policies are enforced fairly and consistently. This is of particular importance to organizations in ensuring compliance with the Family Medical Leave Act (FMLA), as the technology tracks the leave time of employees who avail themselves of the benefits of FMLA.
Establishing a clear audit trail is important in being compliant with the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) as well. Using technology to automate the rules that define who qualifies for overtime in an organization mitigates risks of noncompliance and encourages fair compensation of all employees.

A strategic-thinking HR professional who aligns the HR department’s goals in support of the organization’s goals, and who articulates these goals to C-level executives, is seen an as an advocate for solving business issues, not just HR issues. By encouraging the use of technology to access and process workforce and organizational data from various sources, HR professionals can help C-level executives gain greater clarity on key business issues across the enterprise with increased efficiency and accuracy. Developing a strategic approach—within the context of an organization’s macro environment of competitors, economics, industry trends, and legal issues—significantly increases the value of an HR professional to senior management and the organization.

Joyce Maroney is the senior director of solutions marketing and the director of the Workforce Institute at Kronos Incorporated, which empowers organizations around the world to effectively manage their workforce, and can be reached at http://www.workforceinstitute.org/