Coloring Outside the Lines, Part 2 – HR Adding Value

Part 2: Adding value

So maybe I got you out to talk to staff you didn’t visit before. Now you may be thinking, “That’s all well and good. So I go talk to front-line staff and their managers, but how do I add value? How do I ‘color outside the lines’?” That comes from facilitating change and making use of your new cross-functional knowledge. Taking what we discussed last time, retail management was primarily focused on retail success, as they should be. The managers in the human services programs were focused on providing services for their clients, the disabled individuals the organization serves. Both the retail and program managers had a general idea of the others’ role, but they had their own goals to accomplish. Seeing a broader view and looking for opportunities to gain on both ends by finding common threads often was beyond the line manager’s perspective.

That’s where HR can be a true business partner, both tactically and strategically. Since we serve the entire organization, we can have that broad view, if we choose to make it a part of our work.

Tactical value

In one great example, on a tactical level, site visits and discussions with managers demonstrated two things, beginning a couple of years back. In one major program, the goal was to help long-term unemployed individuals find new ways back into the workforce—and to reach goals set by underlying grants, the organization had to rely on subcontractors to assist in placements, thereby splitting revenue with others that would otherwise come back into our coffers. On the other hand, in the retail stores, a lower-paid workforce made some amount of turnover unavoidable, causing an ongoing recruitment challenge. The opportunity was obvious but only if you looked at both areas together. That birds-eye view only came from the right perspective and seeing both sides of the operation.

After hearing from managers in both areas, this missed opportunity was shared with the recruitment team, and they immediately reached out to the programs to begin coordinating needs—the need to place people from the programs and the need to fill retail vacancies. A true win-win. This is where HR can be a business partner at a tactical level. Admittedly, this garnered some resistance from top-level program management, but that’s more about internal territoriality, a real concern in some organizations, but a concern for another day and another article. Despite the resistance, an opportunity was found because of HR’s birds-eye view, and we capitalized on opportunities.