Top Five Progressive Practices CHROs Need to Adopt
Become a strategic driver for the human side of the business.
“Culture eats strategy for breakfast,” is a famous quote attributed to business management guru Peter Drucker. It remains relevant decades after it was first spoken. If the people within your organization don’t feel connected to the strategy or change initiatives at your company those initiatives won’t be successful.
Strategies that are designed at the top level of an organization in isolation can be out of sync with what’s really happening at the front-lines. This is where the CHRO, head of the Human Resources function, can really add value. If you aren’t actively trying to engage your employees on a regular basis you’re missing out on an opportunity to gather and harness key insight that will improve your company’s performance.
As business consultant Stan Slap says, “Human behavior is only unpredictable and dangerous if you don’t start from humanity in the first place.”
As CHRO, here are 5 ways you can become a stronger strategic partner for your CEO:
- Source opportunities and problems via continuous feedback loops
- Leverage and empower the wisdom of the the workforce
- Build trust through transparency and inclusion
- Engage and tap into the discretionary effort of your employees
- Foster real-time moments for turning insights into action
Providing this type of agile people system will connect you with the culture of your workplace. That’s needed to make sure strategies are on target and being supported. Digital engagement platforms such as Waggl help to enable these systems and provide visualization of data that’s needed to report out in real-time.
Being able to gather large-scale data-sets of your employee’s alignment and sentiment around a change effort is achievable today. CHRO’s that do this well will help their organizations to be change ready, more resilient against changing market dynamics and ultimately sustainably successful.
To do so, you’ll need to be the type of leader that understands that the world doesn’t operate on an annual cycle anymore. Here’s our short list of recommended actions for you to consider to take:
- Stop running Annual or Every 2-year Employee Engagement Surveys. Start a continuous listening strategy pulsing out to employees on a regular basis.
- Or at least augment your employee engagement survey with a pulsing strategy that is transparent and inclusive.
- Stop annual 360s. Start continuous feedback on productivity.
- Stop ignoring the wisdom of the crowd. Start transparency and inclusion touchpoints.
Need some help taking the first step? Reach out to Waggl to help assess your current state and craft a plan of action that fits your starting point and is sensitive to your current culture. Contact us.
