The top HR professionals these days are focused on a lot more than payroll and the administration of benefits. The trend in the 21st century will be to provide development opportunities to people on a custom basis, depending on the needs of individual employees.
The customization goes from choosing between a list of available benefits to taking advantage of personalized coaching or skill-building training. HR professionals are finding they must continue to streamline methods for compliance and recordkeeping so they can get on to more vital work.
Here is what savvy HR managers at large companies are working on today that will work for you in your small business:
1. Making the most of human capital – keeping up-to-date skills inventories of all employees, finding freelance and consulting resources
2. Making the most of a critical time in assessing fit with culture and potential to leadership with pre-employment testing, orientation and tracking of 1st 6 months of employment.
3. Surveying employees for morale and issue indicators – on-line, done twice a year, or more often on timely issues
4. Making coaching available – employees as free agents within the company looking for plum assignments, and getting coached by outside consultants who are objective about their strengths and weaknesses
5. Training employees to understand, accept, and benefit from feedback- testing, 360 degree programs, customized development plans
6. Providing a focal resource for problem resolution – group resources for solving common problems, grievance and ethics hot line for individual problems
Jan B. King is the former President & CEO of Merritt
Publishing, a top 50 woman-owned and run business in Los
Angeles and the author of Business Plans to Game Plans: A
Practical System for Turning Strategies into Action (John
Wiley & Sons, 2004). She has helped hundreds of businesses
with her book and her ebooks, The Do-It-Yourself Business
Plan Workbook, and The Do-It-Yourself Game Plan Workbook.
See www.janbking.com for more information.
