Where Should You Put Your
Energy When You're an HR Dept. of One?
At a recent Society for Human Resource
Management (SHRM) conference,
Deblieux’s top 10
(1) Learn the organization you’re in,
from bottom to top and edge to edge—even though you may have lots of fires to
put out. Deblieux knows someone who took this approach to the extreme: She
refused to begin her job as HR manager until she had spent a month performing a
range of other jobs done in the company—had “walked in the shoes,” in
other words, of salespeople, production line employees, and those in the
warehouse. Another useful technique, though, is HRBWA, or human resources by
walking around—meeting employees and asking questions as you go.
(2) Avoid blaming everything on the law(s).
Compliance, Deblieux says, used to be the number-one task for HR, but it’s
dropped to at least the middle of the list. The better approach is to align
recommended practices, such as affirmative action, harassment prevention, and
high ethical standards, with business objectives. That is, instead of saying,
“We have to do this or we’ll get into legal trouble,” offer strategic
reasons that help the firm achieve its business objectives. Part of doing so, he
suggests, is learning what language your boss speaks and communicating in the
same style. Talk detail to a detail person, cost-efficiency to a number cruncher,
and so on.
(3) Know your customers, who are the
managers and employees of your company, and meet their needs. For example,
managers want timely access to accurate personnel files, they need advice on
compensation and workplace features such as flextime, and they demand that the
HR pro be practical. Employees need to trust HR, looking especially for
confidentiality and occasional advocacy of their concerns. (Here, Deblieux
stresses the balancing act: HR must usually advocate top management’s issues
but should side with employees when the concern is crucial to their well-being
or productivity.) Both managers and employees need HR to be fair rather than to
treat everyone equally.
(4) Understand what constitutes
discrimination and harassment under federal civil rights laws, and, in addition,
the protected classes singled out for protection under the laws of states where
your company operates.
(5) Understand the difference between
exempt and nonexempt employees under the federal Fair Labor Standards Act.
(6) Understand an employer’s rights and
obligations under the doctrine of at-will employment (again, relying on your
national and state binders for information you need). Deblieux stresses that
even in the absence of any kind of employment contract, employees need several
things from their managers—sufficient training and resources to do their jobs;
timely information about performance problems, how to fix them, and the
consequences of failure to improve; help and coaching; and the opportunity to
succeed.
(7) HR must hire solely on job-related
criteria. As a consultant, Deblieux emphasizes that it’s HR’s function to
train managers, if they need it, to avoid subjective decisions and connect all
their activities regarding employees to their job functions and how they’re
performing those functions.
(8) Help managers coach their employees for
development and a focus on the future—for continued improvement and innovation
as well as correcting past mistakes.
(9) Think of personnel files as
relationship files. This serves as a guide to excluding material that doesn’t
belong in them, such as health information, proof of eligibility to work in the
(10) Finally, know that HR requires an
organized and orderly approach, because managers and employees sometimes need
information immediately if not sooner. Neat files, good time management, and
personal efficiency are key to the function.
Would these be your top 10?
How well your own list would match
Deblieux’s will depend a lot on who you are and where you came from. As Debra
Salvas points out, solo practitioner and new to HR aren’t the same thing. For
example, an HR department of one may be a person with the HR education and
experience that shaped Salvas’s thinking. This would be someone thoroughly
familiar with the compliance issues on Deblieux’s list but not with the
company at which he or she has just arrived. Given her background, Salvas
remembers visiting a manufacturing company for the first time and immediately
noting that management had neglected to post the notices required by the federal
Occupational Safety and Health Administration. (In that situation, she cut
straight to the compliance issue—the potential for fines, shortcutting trying
to relate the posters to the firm’s business objectives—maintaining a safe
workplace.) On the other hand, if you have just been promoted from office
manager or purchasing agent to be the company’s first-ever HR manager, your
list wouldn’t begin with getting to know your firm.
Wherever a practitioner starts, Salvas
advocates a somewhat broader view of HR than Deblieux’s strikes her as being.
An excellent first step, she advises, would be to conduct an HR audit of the
company, including benefits, communications, compensation, employee handbook,
legal compliance, metrics, new-employee orientation, performance management,
personnel files, recruitment, retention, safety and health, training, and HR and
business strategies (checking to ensure, with that last item, that the two sets
of strategies are properly aligned). As she notes, each area of investigation
has its own recommended questions and checklists. The next step, naturally,
would be to create and implement an action plan addressing any inadequacies or
mismatches turned up by the audit.
Basic metrics, for example, should include
evaluations of turnover rate, absenteeism rate, cost per hire, cost-efficiency
of benefits and training, analysis of exit interviews, and others. Having those
measurements is just the first step: They must also be benchmarked against rates
for other businesses in the same industry and in the geographic area to ensure
that your compensation rates and other metrics are competitive, and they need to
be assessed for whether they appropriately support the company’s business
objectives.
In auditing performance management, the
solo practitioner would want to look at how, and how often, performance
evaluations are done (which can be a matter of how well supervisors are trained,
Salvas notes); discipline procedures and how well they’re followed; what
percentage of employees is given measurable objectives for improvement (ideally,
she says, it should be all); whether those objectives align with company
business strategies; and what development plans are in place to retain
high-potential employees and bring poor performers up to speed.
But suppose you’ve never done this
before
How would you conduct an HR audit if you
were new to the profession? Salvas urges inexperienced practitioners to be
prompt and aggressive about gaining needed skills and knowledge. Buy books,
subscribe to resources (such as HR and safety products from BLR), join trade
associations (such as SHRM national and your local chapter), and prepare to
obtain HR certification. Use the Internet, call colleagues for advice, visit the
libraries of area business schools. And the mandate to be tidy and organized may
be Deblieux’s way of saying what Salvas describes as the need to “wear many
hats.” She says, “As a solo professional, you may be handling an
employee’s personal issue one minute, a benefit claim the next, and a
recruiting strategy for a hard-to-fill engineering job the minute after that.
Priorities and business needs change fast, and you need to change with them.”
There’s one more issue that Salvas feels
strongly about, and that is HR’s role as a conscience of the company. Along
with speaking the language and serving the needs of top management, as Deblieux
seems to emphasize, she hopes HR will have a seat at the table where policies
are made and believes HR must continually monitor officers’ approaches to
employees and business ethics—and push back whenever it’s necessary to keep
the whole firm on the straight and narrow.