Is the CEO understanding the role of the HR department in the company?

I had the luck to work in companies where the HR teams were perceived as being valuable strategic partners and having the chance of being part of the decision making process. But how many companies in Romania have a CEO that understands the role of the HR department in the business? Less than 25%? Or 50%? What is your take on this?

For many entrepreneurs, HR is a role related to the accounting responsibilities for labor contracts and monthly payroll computation. For others, HR is also running the hiring process – job announcements, interviews, and offers. Of course, some of them expect some other transactions to be managed by HR – training enrolments, health & care, maybe some events for employer branding. As I said, transactional roles.

How many are actually seeing HR as a strategic partner? Is HR part of the discussions with the CFO and the Commercial Director when they explore the growth opportunities? Or when the sales channel changes? Or in the process optimization? If not, read below why you should start to do this from now on.

  1. When you look for a new market you need to have in your team a new set of skills. A good HR will know immediately if you have, internally, the potential or if you need to hire from the market. This is part of the talent management agenda. And you also need a change management approach to communicate the strategy enlargement in the right way and to get the right engagement level from the current team.
  2. When you look to migrate the sales from traditional channels to online ones you need a new set of skills and the right engagement level. A good HR will know for sure if you need to hire externally. And also, will help to implement the change without losing your talents. This is part of the talent management strategy. You don’t know what this is? Ask for it. The best talent management strategy will allow you to work 1 or 2 days per week and grow your business because you have the right people on your boat and you implemented the right culture for a sustainable business.
  3. When you start looking for process optimization, you already realised that the processes at this moment aren’t bringing value but costs. To implement this change, you will need a very good change management approach. People usually don’t embrace change because it’s taking them some time to accept the benefits. First, they see the potential danger, meaning that they could be losing their jobs and automatically, will block any initiative that you may have. A good HR will help you to manage these changes to be implemented without additional costs.

And I can continue the list with many other challenging situations where HR is playing a critical role in counseling the leadership team on how to grow the business with the TEAM.

An experienced HR is skilled to make a company grow, with its business understanding, listening, talent management, and change management expertise. Of course, I am talking about 15+ years of expertise.

But we’ve all started from scratch at some point. Let me help you design the link between the HR role and the business itself. Contact us.