Aside from throwing your money into a bonfire, one of the fastest ways to sabotage your business results is to hire the cheapest HR professionals you can find. When you saddle your executive team with under-staffed (or under-skilled) HR support, you hobble their performance.
Here’s why:
- More than any other person in an organization except for the CEO, the top HR executive impacts how much courage managers will show in hiring and performance management.
- HR has an enormous impact on your budget. In many organizations, the lion’s share of the annual budget is spent on salary and benefits, and HR typically determines how strategically that money is allocated. (Good luck attracting great people when you offer lousy benefits and no clear way of measuring or rewarding performance).
- HR has a huge impact on results. HR maps out the strategies that attract, retain, and inspire the staff to help you achieve your mission. (Good luck trying to achieve great things without great people. Even if you hired some great people, ineffective or bad HR strategies could end up demoralizing them just before you need their best work).
- And when things really go sideways, HR helps you evaluate the legal risk of ushering your hiring mistakes out the door, before they cause even more damage. (Or do you enjoy making chit-chat with your former employees? Lawyers?)