Repurposing HR: From a Cost Center to a Business Accelerator

HR managers have been trained to think of themselves as cost centers, challenged at every budget cycle to cut, pare, and shrink expenses. Their staff brandish benchmarks and statistics to say how engagement affects business success, how the ratio of HR staff to employees is low, and how our turnover is too high. But with all these data, executives still roll their eyes and ask, “But what impact do you have on our bottom line?” By breaking down organizational silos and using a process to generate and foster collective thinking, HR can shift the paradigm from developing programs, policies, and processes to improving the performance and productivity of the workforce. Repurposing HR presents a RoadMap for a new way to look at human resources in terms of the multiple roles that HR plays on the business scene. It will walk through each “StopOver” on the journey, including the * purpose, objectives, knowledge, and skills required * work products * tools and resources that are useful to the practitioner. This is a compelling process for using the skills, competencies, and attributes of the HR team in a systematic and holistic way.

Table of Contents

Chapter 1. Why HR Needs to Become a Business Accelerator
Chapter 2. A Modern HR Fable: Introducing Karen
Chapter 3. The Indictment of HR
Chapter 4. From the Customer Perspective
Chapter 5. Thinking Collectively
Chapter 6. How Can We Do Things Differently?
Chapter 7. StopOver Strategy
Chapter 8. StopOver Analysis
Chapter 9. StopOver Risk Management
Chapter 10. Introducing the RoadMap to the Team
Chapter 11. StopOver Sales and Marketing
Chapter 12. StopOver Resource Steward
Chapter 13. StopOver Advocate
Chapter 14. StopOver Investor
Chapter 15. StopOver Trusted Advisor
Chapter 16. Karen Puts the RoadMap to Use
Chapter 17. Applying the RoadMap to the Small HR Team
Chapter 18. Final Thoughts
Appendix A: The Commitment Curve
Appendix B: The Change Curve