2 Things to Do to Address HR’s Biggest Pain Points

We had a great time and learned a lot at the Alabama SHRM Conference a couple of weeks ago. It’s always great to network with colleagues and learn from some of the best in our profession. We try to make this type of event part of our professional development game plan.

In order to learn even more at the conference, we asked the professionals who stopped by our booth to complete a short survey where they identified their biggest pain points in HR.

Here’s how the results shook out (subscribers click through to see chart):

While there was no stand-out pain point above all the others, the highest scoring area was compliance training at 31%. Next in line were leadership training and employee development at 24%. In trying to make some sense out of these trends from the additional comments people added, two key things emerged:

1. HR professionals’ biggest pain points are the things that impact the business in the long term. When you add it all up, so many of the things are people development issues- employee development, training of all varieties and succession planning- all critically important, but….
2. The pain points aren’t being impacted for one of two reasons:
   1. Lack of buy-in from upper management
   2. Lack of time to address

So how do we address the things that are keeping us from impacting the important things? I found some insights from the conference:

1. There was so much focus at the conference on HR needing and wanting to be a “strategic business partner” and wanting a “seat at the table”. This ties to number 1 here. The gist of how to get a seat at the table and therefore buy-in from upper management was you gotta prove it. The best way to prove it is through data that shows the impact on the bottom line. In one of Jennifer McClure’s she focused on utilizing data to help make better human capital decisions, not to track metrics that have happened in the past. For example, she used data to get her boss to buy-in to an HRIS system that was needed.For example, one professional noted that the biggest pain point he/she has is succession planning. Comments he/she made tied to this issue went something like this… “We think the leaders that have been here 10 years will stay another 10 and even though I know they all won’t; there is no buy-in at the top to start planning in case people at the senior management level do exit for whatever reason”.Want to get senior management’s attention in order to get buy-in to start planning? Put in front of them the replacement cost of someone at that level and the lost time in productivity due to someone at that level exiting unexpectedly. Most cost to replace stats (SHRM has some good resources on this) show a 100-200% of base salary cost and that doesn’t even factor in lost time due to productivity.
2. In terms of addressing lack of time to address key HR pain point areas, two insights showed up from the conference during Dawn Hrdlica-Burke’s lunch keynote on HR needing a revival. Some simple, yet profound insights were offered as methods to get rid of the “stuff” and to devote time to purpose and addressing your greatest HR pain points.
1. Get control of your email.

   A great guy was sitting next to me at the lunch. When she mentioned getting control of your email, he leaned over and said, “I’ve started checking email ONLY at Noon and at 4 pm and it has increased my productivity dramatically.” I knew he wasn’t joking when we emailed after the conference about getting together for some business development reasons and I got an automatic reply from him stating that he only checks email at Noon and 4, and he would respond to me during one of those times. Well done! What is he doing during with that increased productivity time? My hope would be he is addressing some of those key pain point areas that impact the bottom line.

2. Delegate.

Once you’ve maximized some productive time by not letting your email control you, you can either delegate 1) the stuff that is keeping you from getting to your critical HR pain point areas (and a pain point may actually be one of these) or you can 2) delegate the pain point area. For example, if compliance training is your number one pain point area that you don’t have enough time to get to (and I would tell you this isn’t a strategic priority, it is just a get it done and check if off thing), then find a quality vendor that can deliver this training for you in a way that leads to more efficiency. But wait you say, “I can’t do that, it will cost money and I’m back to my issue of lack of buy-in”. See number 1 above. Prove the value of outsourcing it to with data. You know you’ve found a good vendor when they can provide you with this data to prove it.

We at Horizon Point spend a lot of time focusing on helping clients address those strategic pain point areas that are critical to employee development. Contact us if you need to consider how you might bring in help to address those priorities that lead to a more engaged workforce. And we can help you with the data to prove it’s worth it. An example here.

What is one thing you can do today to address a pain point?

Author

• Mary Ila Ward

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