The Most Underrated Part of Your Business: Your HR Strategy
We never talk about our human resource strategy, HR’s never really top of mind, and we don’t attend many board meetings on specific outcomes of next years’ HR strategy. Why is that? HR has a bad wrap stemming from University, everyone joked about the crazy HR lady at companies. You know, the lady that had been there for 30 years and still hugged you on occasion but recognized it was “wrong” in the workplace?
Everyone has had that first entry line government, public company, or crown corp job and had a run in with a person in an HR department, you had that feeling that you’re pretty sure that person doesn’t “actually” do anything at work. Any way I’m getting off track.
I’ve always liked HR but never took classes in it in University, seemed too much like common sense. HR somehow keeps coming up when working with clients. Every client I really enjoy working with, the ones who had a proactive business strategy, always attracted the best people to work for them. They had a great HR strategy. It’s easy to say the best companies have a great HR strategy, it’s difficult to determine why.
Jack Welch, in his book Winning, talks about human resources a lot, he says the person in charge of HR should be at or above the CFO in the corporate hierarchy. The team with the best players, wins, Welch says. Sounds very similar to what Jim Collins talks about in Good to Great regarding getting the right people on the bus. He emphasizes: first who, then what.
When it comes to your website, the “About” page becomes very important. If you attract the most brilliant people to work with you, you better be showcasing them on your website. Neuromarketing expert Roger Dooley says, in a Forbes article titled What Your ‘About Us’ Page Is Missing, you should be making it easy for potential customers to “like” you on your website. That’s right, if customers like you, you have a much better chance of selling them something or doing business with them in some capacity. And no, not in the liking on Facebook type of liking, I mean actually finding a general interest in you by learning more about you.
The more potential customers can find out about you on your website before they make the decision to work with you, the better. It’s like you’re selling to them but in electronic form, done properly, you’re making the sale before you even say one word to them in person.
Working with Coda Clothing & Shoes in Regina, Colter wanted a different style of “About us” page. We put together a plan to interview all staff, asking them roughly 50 of the same random questions. Then on the About Us page we’d post the staff members photo and their best answers. I think it turned out to be pretty awesome. Oh, and Coda being the different type of company it is, would never call it an “About Us” page, we ended up calling it a very appropriate “Family” page. See the Coda “Family” page here.
Working with Capital Ford Lincoln in Regina we wanted to do a video entitled Why do people like working at Capital Ford? We filmed a bunch of people from all over the dealership and this was the final product:
Your people will always be your most valuable asset. Don’t you think it’s time you invested in making them smarter? If you have the best players on your team, it’ll be hard not to win.
