High Value, Low Investment: HR as Organizational Value AcceleratorSM
By Regan MacBain Traub, CPC, SPHR | March 20, 2020
Accelerating change in organizations can be dizzying. The myriad of shifts in strategies and structures, re-positioning to gain market share, managing floods of data and analytics, growing digitalization, regulatory changes and political uncertainty, pushing for faster innovation and speed to market, tightening labor markets, increasing salaries and benefits costs as well as ensuring highly engaging work environments to attract and retain a talented workforce… to name a few. Organizations remain under mounting pressure to find high impact, low-cost solutions to sustain, develop and innovate in their organizations while resources remain tight and shareholders seek increasing value and market share. Today’s successful business and HR leaders require constant strategic and operational vigilance and positioning, meaningful metrics, clear lines of sight from strategy to execution by department and role, collaboration, highly effective communication and coalition building skills, courage and resilience.
During the past decade, operations leaders have been focused on finding process and resource efficiencies to improve EBITA and bottom lines. How much cost efficiency is left? With the economic rebuild of the past few years, there has been a deep breath of momentum while the pandemic is signaling heightened needs for scenario planning while we await fallout.
Recent “startling and compelling” research results by David Ulrich Ph.D. (globally considered the Father of Modern HR) and his team, have proven a significant opportunity for organizations to achieve exceptional value through Human Resources. For decades, the HR function has been seen as a cost center. This research proves that conversely, HR can deliver significant value.
With data from over 32,000 leaders across 1,200 organizations, the findings proved that integrated HR & OD functions deliver significantly higher value to an organization1:
- 4X greater impact to business performance
- 4X the value to line managers
- Over 3X greater value to investors and owners and
- More than 2X the value to external customers.
Since 1995, The Human Resource Consortium is one of the few consultancies in the U.S. that has been leading the work on designing and implementing integrated systems in HR and OD. In fact, we were the first on the eastern seaboard to do so.