Summary
This article shares how integrated Human Resources (HR) and Organizational Development (OD) systems can generate a 4X to 8X increase in performance and value for organizations. Backed by global research and decades of consulting experience, it identifies key, data-driven levers of impact — including employee engagement, change management success, and the design of aligned HR frameworks. It also outlines actionable pathways for organizations ready to evolve from moderate performance to transformative value creation.
The Human Resource Consortium, LLC. Proprietary Concept & Graphic, 2024.
Key Questions for C-Suite Executives
- Where is your organization in the process of capturing this level of performance and wellbeing?
- How else could you achieve a 4X to 8X increase in performance and organizational value?
- What more could you accomplish by harvesting this elusive — but measurable — level of growth?
Leading Global, Research-Backed HR & OD Advancements
For the past 30 years, The Human Resource Consortium (TheHRC) has worked at the forefront of HR and OD consulting. As global research continues to evolve, so does our work – consistently staying ahead of best-practice curves and focused on measurable value.
Below are three of the most compelling research-backed insights that validate the impact of aligned HR systems:
1) Integrated HR Systems Drive 400% Organizational Performance and Value
According to 2016 global research, led by David Ulrich, PhD (globally recognized as the father of modern HR), published in “Victory Through Organization” by Ulrich, Kryscynski, Ulrich & Brockbank, McGraw-Hill, 2017:
- Data of 1,395 organizations from 31,868 total respondents including 27,904 non-HR leaders and 3,964 HR leaders
- Proved that integrated systems in HR can drive a 400% increase in organizational performance and value.
This level of ROI comes from aligning strategy, structure, leadership development, and internal talent frameworks into one cohesive system.
2) Employee Engagement Fuels Customer Loyalty (233% ROI)
“Employee Engagement: Paving the Way to Customer Loyalty” by the Aberdeen Group, 2015 revealed:
— Elevated employee engagement delivers a 233% increase in customer retention, expansion, and referral.
This underscores the strategic connection between internal culture and external market performance.
3) HR-Led Change Management Increases Success Rates from 30% to 80%
Research on large-scale change in “Beyond Performance 2.0,” Scott Keller & Bill Schaninger, McKinsey & Co., 2019
— Reported that adept HR change management expertise elevates change management success from 30% to 80%.
Organizations with aligned HR and OD capabilities are far more likely to implement sustained change.
Key Takeaway
When HR frameworks are aligned with organizational strategy, leadership, and culture, the performance gains are not marginal – they are exponential.
How & Where TheHRC Makes a Measurable Difference
At The Human Resource Consortium (TheHRC), we partner with organizations to design and implement customized, high-impact solutions that align people, systems, and strategy. Our work is grounded in a simple goal. Make it easier for:
- Leaders and managers to lead;
- Employees to perform to the best of their abilities, be valued, and rewarded; and
- Organizations, their people, and their communities to thrive.
Through our integrated approach, clients achieve measurable gains in employee performance, engagement, and retention — enabling leadership to deliver on strategic goals more effectively.
Our Consulting Model in Culture, Leadership Development, HR and OD
- Full-Cycle: From assessment and consultation to solution design and implementation
- ROI-Driven: Sustainable, partnered, and measurable
- Expert-Led: Three decades of proven success in key leadership HR, and OD domains
Areas of Expertise
We bring deep capability across every component of the people and performance ecosystem:
- Organizational culture and alignment
- Leadership assessment, development, and executive coaching
- Internal communication to elevate trust and performance
- Employee engagement strategies and development
- Development of HR strategies and capability
- HR frameworks, talent development, and performance metrics
- HR operational systems (HRIS, compliance, audits, payroll, etc.)
- Retained search
Client Sectors:
- For-profit
- Nonprofit
- Governmental and quasi-governmental organizations
Service Industries Served:
- Financial services
- Healthcare
- Hospitality
- Professional services
- Retail
Technical Industries Served:
- High tech
- Manufacturing
Key Takeaway
Organizations thrive when strategy, leadership, and talent are aligned. We partner with clients to design the frameworks and systems that make that alignment real – and scalable.
Partnered Culture Accountability: Leaders and HR
Creating a high-performing culture is not the responsibility of HR alone. It’s a partnered endeavor between leadership and the HR function. We help organizations create:
- Clear, culture defining roles to design culture as a performance lever rather than an abstract idea; and
- Achievable culture that fuels sustainable, competitive advantage.
Leadership’s Role in Culture Accountability
Leaders’ core responsibilities in culture are to lead the design, champion, and measure the organization’s cultural pillars needed to achieve their strategy, including:
- Setting strategy and organizational performance metrics
- Defining strategically-aligned culture and values
- Communicating desired culture clearly and consistently
- Consistently championing and modeling the desired culture
- Building trust at all levels, across the organization
- Monitoring and reporting performance on strategy and culture
HR’s Role in Culture Accountability
HR translates defined culture into systems, frameworks, and practices that shape day-to-day experience. Core HR responsibilities include:
- Designing and aligning HR frameworks to strategy and culture
- Developing and measuring leadership and executive coaching programs
- Conducting organizational needs assessments and implementing solutions
- Designing and delivering effective training programs
- Tracking performance impact of development initiatives
- Facilitating trust-building efforts across the organization
Key Takeaway
Culture becomes scalable and sustainable when leadership and HR are aligned in intention, communication, and execution.
The Compelling Business Case for Higher HR & OD Competence
Elevating HR and OD capacity isn’t just a professional ideal — it’s a bottom-line business case backed by leading benchmarks.
What High-Performing Workplaces Have in Common
According to the Great Place to Work Institute, organizations certified on its Fortune 100 Best Companies to Work For list consistently outperform peers across key business metrics:
- 19 percentage point outperformance in market returns (74% vs. 55%)
- 86% of employees report using discretionary effort
- 4X greater employee retention (half the turnover rate)
- 15X more likely to be selected as an employer of choice
What Engagement Looks Like at the Top
We asked Scott Cawood, PhD, EdD, CEO of WorldatWork and former Great Place to Work Institute executive, what engagement scores look like inside high-performing companies. Scott shared:
- Engaged employees: 86–92%
- Actively disengaged employees: Only 2–3%
- ‘Good’ engagement level by GPTWI standards: 66%
If your organization’s engagement score is below 66%, you’re not alone — but you’re also not close to top-performing benchmarks.
Why This Matters More Than Ever
The HRC compiled findings from 8+ reputable U.S. engagement studies (including Gallup and others). The results? Engagement and disengagement levels are approaching a dangerous equilibrium.
Productivity is now being driven primarily by the ‘Not Engaged’ group – a segment that is neither committed nor actively disruptive, but vulnerable to turnover and disengagement triggers.
Key Takeaway
The #1 driver of employee engagement is trust in leadership.
The data is clear – and the opportunity is measurable. What 2 – 3 things might you do to quickly instill greater trust with employees in your organization?
Where Are HR & Organization Development Today?
Despite meaningful advancements in the HR profession over the last decade, many organizational leaders have still not seen high-performing HR in action.
The Current State
- Most leaders report moderate HR performance and employee engagement
- HR is still widely seen as slow to evolve
- Even forward-thinking organizations struggle to translate strategic goals into HR execution
If you’ve felt like HR isn’t delivering transformational results – you’re not alone. But that doesn’t mean change isn’t possible.
Elevating HR Capacity and Efficacy
In our decades of successful HR, OD, change, and retained search consulting experience, we’ve seen that real transformation happens when organizations invest in thoughtfully targeted communication, mindset shifts, development, and aligned and integrated HR frameworks which guide and sustain process and behavioral change.
What It Takes to Elevate HR Performance
To achieve a quantum leap in HR and OD efficacy, organizations must commit to these steps:
- Clarifying and investing in mindset shifts across the HR team
- Providing targeted development in areas like strategy, systems, and influence
- Establishing active collaboration between HR and executive leadership
- Planning effective change management with clear and compelling communications
- Appointing a non-HR executive champion to support cross-functional alignment
- Providing ongoing education and accountability for HR & OD deliverables
This effort includes:
- Strategic and operational focus
- Specialized development of HR leaders and practitioners
- HR frameworks’ alignment and integrated redesign for sustainable evolution
- Structured implementation for digestible grasp by leaders and employees
- Effective communications plan and messaging for strategic and operational rollout
The Transformation Timeline
For most organizations, through a partnered effort by external experts to transfer knowledge and expertise to internal HR leaders and practitioners, aligning and integrating HR and talent frameworks can be achieved in 6 to 9 months.
Key Takeaways
When these steps and factors align, organizations can expect measurable gains in engagement, performance, retention, and culture trust metrics.
This transformation doesn’t take years — it takes clarity, commitment, futuristic strategic thinking, and an aligned and integrated HR sub-functional approach.
Culture Shifting: Building Inclusive, High-Trust Organizations
At TheHRC, we’ve helped organizations across industries shift their cultures to be more inclusive, collaborative, service-focused, and performance-driven. Culture isn’t abstract — it’s shaped by systems, leadership behavior, and shared norms.
What High-Trust Cultures Share
Organizations that consistently outperform their peers tend to exhibit:
- Welcoming and inclusive behaviors at all levels
- Strong cross-functional collaboration and teaming
- Internal and external, service-focused mindsets grounded in shared values
- A culture of worthiness and interaction safety
These traits lead to higher levels of trust, engagement, innovation, and employee retention — especially when supported by consistent leadership modeling and effective feedback loops.
Innovation and service are the lifeblood of organizations.
Organizational sustainability requires leaders to leverage the perspectives and experiences of the vast array of differences represented by their workforce through cross-team, inclusive collaboration.
Key Takeaways
A high-performance culture makes belonging and performance inseparable.
A high-performance culture is not built by slogans — it’s built by consistent communications and modeling by leaders, aligned HR frameworks and development, and supported by behavioral reinforcement and recognition/rewards.
How might you strengthen your organizational culture for greater engagement, performance, and customer loyalty?
Talent Strategies that Drive Organizational Performance
Our workforce is continuing to evolve rapidly. Winning organizations are continuing to shift their focus from transactional HR to strategic talent experience. This effort creates customized, engaging opportunities for people to feel the experience of working in the specific organizational culture through recruitment, onboarding, leadership, teaming, and development.
Employee Experience & Employment Branding
To compete in today’s talent marketplace, employers must:
- Treat candidates and employees like customers
- Redesign onboarding and communication flows for clarity, consistency, and connection
- Craft clear, inspiring, and truthful Employee Experience Statements
- Measure effectiveness through pulse surveys and staffing metrics
Organizations that systemically design and deliver employee experience — and not, a slogan — see higher retention, engagement, and brand reputation.
Talent Acquisition in a Post-Covid Era
- The U.S. labor participation rate has dropped from 65.2% in 2010 to 62.5% in 2024 (Brookings)
- Social media, AI, and automation are presenting pivotal change to how organizations recruit, engage, and select applicants and candidates
- Balancing high-tech tools with high-touch interactions is key to building emotional connection prior to hire
Where could your TA practices soar with stronger digital experience and deeper candidate engagement?
New Hire Processing, Orientation, and Onboarding Best Practices
Today’s onboarding is not a checklist – it’s the start of a relationship. From offer acceptance to year one, each interaction either builds or erodes trust, performance, and retention.
Pre-Start Engagement
Top organizations engage new hires before day one by:
- Sending digital welcome packets and videos
- Assigning pre-start touchpoints from hiring managers
- Creating a sense of anticipation and belonging during the waiting period
To what degree are your new hires engaged before they even begin?
Orientation vs. Onboarding
These terms are often confused. They serve distinct purposes:
- Orientation (first 1–2 weeks): Includes new hire processing, compliance, technology and worksite access, organization structure and operation, benefits, team introductions and workflows
- Onboarding (first 6–12 months): Builds manager and team connection, performance clarity and feedback, regular coaching, and inter-departmental collaboration.
Organizations that separate these stages and invest in each see faster ramp-up and higher engagement and retention.
Coaching & Connection Matter
High-performing teams incorporate:
- Frequent check-ins during the first 90 days
- Performance-based coaching plans
- Clear alignment between expectations, goals, and culture
Key Takeaway
Onboarding is not a process – it’s a performance accelerator.
Done right, it transforms new hires into high-value contributors.
Performance Management:From Dreaded to Development-Driven
Annual reviews alone have been declining in effectiveness. Top performing organizations are replacing them with simpler, more frequent conversations and scorecards which are grounded in clarity, performance goals, and development.
What Works Today
- Quarterly (or more frequent) feedback conversations
- Tech-enabled tools that streamline input and documentation
- Development Enabled Manager and Employee Dialogue and Feedback – to build relationships, not dread
How have you created greater connection, collaboration, and efficacy between employees and managers to effect appropriate feedback, development coaching, and documentation?
Career Planning & Progression
When high-performers can’t see a future with your organization, they’ll tend to look elsewhere. It’s time to elevate employee engagement, career pathing and planning, development, educational benefit, mentoring, and succession discussions.
Best Practices That Elevate Retention and Performance
- Internal career pathing and counseling
- Professional development tied to career goals and/or succession planning
- Tuition reimbursement, leadership development, and micro-credentialing programs
- Special projects
These efforts show employees they are not just filling a role — they’re building a career with your organization.
Key Takeaway
Retention is driven by purpose, career development, and the feeling of being valued and recognized for meaningful contribution.
Leadership Development: Aligning Direction and Trust
Two predominant challenges in leadership today are the needs to create:
- Strategic and operational alignment within and across leadership levels
- Enhanced trust and communications between leaders, managers, and employees – up, down, and across the department and organization.
Both directly correlate with low employee engagement, fractured execution, and lost organizational performance and value.
Turning It Around
To address these issues, high-performing organizations are:
- Actively facilitating leadership alignment
- Investing in executive and leader, team and individual, coaching with peer feedback
- Training leaders in cultural modeling and authentic, transparent communication
Leadership is not just a role – it’s a system that effects the employee experience, engagement, performance, retention, and value.
Key Takeaway
When leaders are not aligned and/or trusted, performance will always fall short of potential.
What do you see as the cost in your organization?
Organization Development (OD): Designing High-Performance Conditions
Low employee engagement and trust gaps, poor development, and AI disruption are widespread, current realities. Organizational Development is the function that guides the transformation of those perceived or experienced threats into growth mindsets and capability.
OD’s Strategic Imperative
Organizations must now:
- Build systems that embed trust into internal and external people dynamics, processes and performance
- Strengthen leadership development pipelines
- Plan and prepare for people and operational impacts of AI and automation
OD is no longer optional — it’s the essential backbone behind adaptive, high-performing organizations.
Total Rewards: Communicating the Full Value of Employment
Employees don’t just want a paycheck – they want to:
- Be in a role and organization that makes a difference in something that matters
- Contribute meaningfully and feel valued and rewarded
- Feel supported in their career growth and successful performance
- Work with people they respect and who respect and care about them
- Be treated equitably in terms of compensation, opportunities, and rewards
Best Practices in Total Rewards
- Create single-page, comprehensive visual Total Rewards Statements – not limited to only pay and array of benefits
- Post them on internal dashboards and digital boards, in employee handbooks and annual total rewards statements
- Reinforce value during reviews, onboarding, and year-end conversations
Are your employees seeing the full value of their employment with your organization?
A Case Study on Point
Accelerated Culture Shift Enables Record-Time Expansion Strategy
The CEO’s Challenge
While working with a F200 F&B client, their CEO introduced us to the CEO of an esteemed, privately held, 2,000 employee retail client with a rapid and sizable expansion strategy. We met with Wawa’s CEO and Chief HR Officer to learn, in sum, they wanted a top to bottom culture shift (including supply chain) that would be completed in under five (5) years to enable their new significant growth strategy from their Mid-Atlantic headquarters to Florida and the MidWest. Best practices in culture change have been ten (10) years in duration yet, we needed to design, develop, and execute all within less than 5.
Having formerly been a Chief HR Officer, the CEO knew that to successfully achieve their strategy, they would need to re-tool their talent acquisition approaches and methodology in selection, onboarding, and development while transforming their culture from welcoming to inclusive of employees and customers who represented broader differences than those of their past.
Year 1: Leadership Team Partnership to:
- Co-develop our culture change strategy with leaders’ endorsement;
- Facilitate development of leaders’ culture championship capability, desired cultural competence and confidence, and internal communications strategy and messaging.
Year 2: HR Capacity-Building and Operations Planning to:
- Initially assess existing HR frameworks, processes, and practices for efficacy to enable the desired culture shift and significant organizational growth;
- Facilitate HR development – TheHRC’s HR as Culture AcceleratorSM Program in culture change and HR consulting
- Capitalize on Wawa’s HR team’s new skills to partner on assessing, redesigning, and implementing HR’s frameworks and practices to enable the rapid and complex geographic, operational, staffing, and onboarding expansion timeline and goals.
- Initialize awareness-raising training across organization in partnered facilitation with internal training staff.
Year 3: HR-Partnered Organizational Leaders and Employee Training & Supply Chain Strategy and Plan
- Continue facilitated, partnered culture training throughout organization for all organizational staff with focus on skill-building.
- Meet with Operations and Retail leaders to gain data, perspectives, and needs.
- Co-create Supply Chain strategy to expand providers and product arrays to meet the needs of various geographic and culturally-based sites.
- Work with Retail leaders to develop service strategies and plans.
The impact? We:
- Successfully completed our goals for our client within 3.5 years… more than 250% faster than best practice;
- Developed a more engaging, collaborative, partnered culture shift;
- Built higher levels of internal competence, employee engagement, and culture shift sustainability while mitigating consultant cost and dependency; and
- Achieved its desired five-year expansion strategy as evidenced by its current success in Southeast and MidWest markets.
Final Thoughts
When HR and OD frameworks are initially aligned with organizational strategy, internal and external goals, and desired culture… and then integrated with each other, the impact isn’t theoretical — it’s measurable. Whether you’re aiming to boost retention, unlock engagement, or realize a 4X gain in performance and value, the pathway to greater wins is well-illuminated and before you.
It’s built – through:
- compelling alignment between strategy and culture
- effective organizational understanding by leaders and HR
- wholehearted commitment with timely and persuasive messaging
- strategic and detailed focus to integrate policies, processes, and practices
- change readiness, collaborative mindset, and desire to elevate performance
To Get Started
When your team is ready to assess the current viability of shifting HR’s frameworks for a significant performance boost, let’s schedule a conversation to explore how TheHRC can guide your HR team’s journey to redesign sustainable HR frameworks that will springboard your organization to its next level of value. Call us toll-free at 855.493.1500.
#HR #IntegratedHRSystems #IntegratedHRSolutions #OrganizationDevelopment #HRBestPractices #HRTransformation #HRChangeManagement
By Regan MacBain Traub, CPC
Founder & Managing Principal
The Human Resource Consortium, LLC