SHRM Certified Professional (SHRM-CP) and SHRM Senior Certified Professional (SHRM-SCP) identify and detail eight behavioral competencies that will be tested for both the SHRM-CP and SHRM-SCP. They make up a whopping 50 percent of both exams. The eight behavior competencies are segregated by SHRM into three clusters: Leadership, Business, and Interpersonal.

A competency is a cluster of interrelated attributes that includes knowledge, skills, and abilities (KSAs) that lead to behaviors that have been identified as needed to perform a specific job effectively. Competencies can be either technical (the knowledge required to perform a specific job) or just behavioral in nature. A behavioral competency is the application of knowledge to job-related behavior. Thus, technical competencies for HR professionals reflect what knowledge they are expected to apply to their jobs, and a behavioral competency is about how they apply the knowledge. Please note that there may be more in-depth information about some of the behaviors within the knowledge topics in Chapters 4 through 6.

In each of the eight behavioral competencies, we have included the outline of SHRM’s Body of Competency and Knowledge (BoCK) key concepts¹ (foundational knowledge), which are a description of what HR professionals are expected to know to perform their job. It’s important to learn and know the distinction between what SHRM has identified and detailed versus what your organization may have culturally expressed with expectations of behavior because they may be different.

Leadership Cluster

The Leadership cluster represents 13 percent of both exams’ weighted scores. There are two competencies that fall within the Leadership cluster:

•   Behavioral competency 1—Leadership and Navigation

•   Behavioral competency 2—Ethical Practice

Regardless of experience level or job title, all HR professionals need to demonstrate and display strong leadership skills and ability, keeping in mind the focus of a strategic mind-set.

Behavioral Competency 1—Leadership and Navigation

The first competency in the SHRM-identified behavioral competency model is Leadership and Navigation. This competency focuses on understanding leadership and the knowledge/skills needed to be an effective HR leader, along with being an HR business partner in your organization and contributing to initiatives and processes for the organization. Additionally, an effective HR professional builds trust, influences, motivates and has the required level of emotional intelligence to demonstrate those behaviors.

Four subcompetencies comprise the Leadership and Navigation competency. They are defined by SHRM² as follows:

•   Navigating the organization Working within the parameters of the organization’s hierarchy, processes, systems, and policies

•   Vision Defining and supporting a coherent vision and long-term goals for HR that support the strategic direction of the organization

•   Managing HR initiatives Executing the implementation and management of HR projects or initiatives that support HR and organizational objectives

•   Influence Inspiring colleagues to understand and pursue the strategic vision and goals of HR and the organization

Key Concepts

•   Leadership theories (e.g., situational leadership, transformational leadership, participative leadership, inclusive leadership)

•   People management techniques (e.g., directing, coaching, supporting, delegating)

•   Motivation theories (e.g., goal-setting theory, expectancy theory, attribution, theory, self-determination theory)

•   Influence and persuasion techniques (e.g., personal appeal, forming coalitions, leading by examples, rational persuasion)

•   Trust- and relationship-building techniques (e.g., emotional and social intelligence)

Definition

According to SHRM, “Leadership and Navigation is defined as the knowledge, skills, abilities, and other characteristics (KSAOs) needed to navigate the organization and accomplish HR goals, to create a compelling vision and mission for HR that aligns with the strategic direction and culture of the organization, to lead and promote organizational change, to manage the implementation and execution of HR initiatives, and to promote the role of HR as a key business partner.”³

Proficiency Indicators for All HR Professionals

The Leadership and Navigation competency for all HR professionals focuses on understanding leadership and the skills and knowledge needed to be a leader: influencing, building trust, emotional intelligence, and motivation. Yet first there needs to be an understanding as to the difference between managing and leading. Both are needed to get work done through people. Knowing when and how to lead and when to manage is the key to effective leadership and navigation. All HR professionals are expected to conduct themselves according to these expectations.

Conforming to Organizational Culture

Organizations create their own models of leadership, creating a set of expected behaviors, attitudes, and beliefs that become the leadership norm for the organization to fit in with the organization’s mission and strategies. The result is a leadership culture. Managers/leaders are then expected to conform to that identified model, a norm, to guide their interactions in managing people.

Organizations desire to identify the type of leadership that is most effective in their workplaces. This self-awareness can then be used to identify individuals with the potential for leadership and to create leadership development programs and use these identified norms when sourcing new hires via branding the leadership culture.

Collaborating Among Stakeholders

There are basically five steps to apply to gain collaboration with stakeholders:

1.   Know the stakeholders. The first step toward any collaboration process is identifying stakeholders and their roles. Understanding who you are working with is critical to collaborating effectively.

2.   Identify what is at stake. Every stakeholder has involvement for a specific reason. Use their role and motivation to your advantage. For example, if you are working on an office reconfiguration for HR, consider including the IT manager in every conversation that relates to the new room design, not just those explicitly regarding the movement of PCs. Why? Because they may be affected by the decisions made in those conversations pertaining to the location of cables, connectivity, and other associated matters such as overtime for IT personnel.

3.   Understand each stakeholder’s issues and language. Communicating effectively with stakeholders is linked to their motivation. For example, for decision-makers, every project is an investment because they are normally responsible for their share of the resources. To collaborate effectively, you should discuss plans in relation to the planned outcomes or ROI.

4.   Set the specific expectations. Once you know who stakeholders are, what their challenges and issues are, and how to talk to them, you can better express your expectations for their involvement, such as when they are expected to provide input for the project and how to provide feedback.

5.   Value their input. One reason stakeholders can become frustrated is they don’t feel “heard.” Helping stakeholders to see how their input was incorporated or even why it was not used is essential. It makes them an active part of decision-making without letting them make the decision.

Accomplishing Tasks

Leaders get things done through people, which means managing people and their tasks for producing desired outcomes. Chapter 4 discusses in great detail the techniques, skills, and theories to manage and motivate people with tasks.

Managers do the following with groups:

•   Plan activities

•   Organize and identify resources required, including people

•   Direct work in a way that ensures the best use of resources

•   Coordinate to achieve efficiency

•   Control resources and activities through monitoring, measuring, and correcting as needed

Leaders perform the following roles with groups:

•   They model desired values in all their actions.

•   They challenge the status quo and harness the talent in the organization to solve problems, accept change, and move in a new direction.

•   They inspire and influence people toward achieving a common vision and goals.

•   They maintain employees’ motivation and focus.

•   They foster growth and develop people to their full potential.

If an organization has ineffective management, it will fail to meet goals. On the other hand, if organizations lack leadership, they often lack innovation and the ability to adapt to change.

Demonstrating Agility and Expertise

Although the concept of learning agility is not new, it is gaining a lot of momentum in today’s organizations. There is a clear message from the mounting research around demonstrating agility: you should be either hiring for it, developing it, or, perhaps, doing both. The traits to look for are simple: self-driven motivation to learn, seeking out and using feedback, and an openness to try something new and different (to welcome discomfort). It’s not easy, yet having developmental experiences is what leads to a new level of expertise and innovation. Success as a leader depends largely on a willingness and ability to learn because it enables leaders to acquire new behaviors quickly and effectively, which ultimately enables adaptability and resilience. While this overarching concept of learning agility may have always been important, it seems even more so now given the constant turmoil of today’s business environment. This can explain why some of the world-renowned management experts are saying now is the time to put your bets on learners.

Setting the Vision

Leaders create energy. They inspire, empower, and support others. And they set vision. Setting a vision of what can be serves as a powerful inspiration, a North Star of sorts for a leader, to move everyone in an organization in the same direction toward that vision’s achievement. That vision needs to be clear and achievable—something that inspires others to want to be a part of it. Leaders must continually point to this North Star and remind everyone that this is where we are all headed. The behavior that is most essential with this leadership ability is going to involve inspiring and motivating others.

Leading the Organization Through Adversity

“The best developer of a leader is failure,” said Richard Branson, chairman of Virgin Airlines. Business history is full of examples of leaders whose organizations ran into adversity and bounced back to become more successful than before. It was through the leadership that created the survivors. A great example is Steve Jobs who was fired from Apple Computer and then rehired when it was on the brink of despair. When he came back to Apple, he had a new view of the market that caused him to lead Apple with products like the iPod, which ended up redefining the industry. It was through his vision and ability as a leader to paint the picture of what could be, design the strategy, and send in the resources. The rest is history.

Promoting Consensus

Getting people to move together as a unified team toward a common goal has always been challenging. However, with consensus building, management can ensure they have the support of the entire team as they steer the organization in the chosen direction.

This concept is known as consensus management. It is not a new concept (Native Americans have been utilizing it for hundreds of years), and now organizations like Starbucks have successfully incorporated it into their management processes. Consensus management is the process where team members work as a group to develop a solution and agree to support whatever decision is made in the best interests of the whole. It requires asking for input from each person on the team, carefully considering that feedback, and making an earnest effort to address any concerns that are raised. This is most commonly accomplished by holding a consensus meeting where staff is empowered to voice their support and concerns. The key to success here is that everyone agrees to support the consensus decision once it is made, regardless of how they feel about it.

Serving as a Transformational Leader

Leadership today is associated with a group role, placing value on behaviors characterized as authentic leadership or transformational leadership.

The following are key elements of this type of approach to leadership:

•   Power Leaders can be recognized as formal or informal. They often exercise the power to empower other team members, act as their champion, and support their efforts.

•   Orientation Transformational leaders think in terms of vision, strategy, and values rather than short-term objectives. They believe in challenging and developing for the long term.

•   Emotional intelligence They have the knowledge and skills that allow transformational leaders to be self-aware of their actions and emotions and to understand others’ perspectives and the drivers of other people’s behavior.

•   Ethical grounding They walk the talk of the organization’s values, encouraging others, and will sacrifice for those values.

Proficiency Indicators for Senior HR Professionals

Senior HR professionals are expected to be able to do and say the following behaviors over and above the basic behaviors already reviewed.

Leading HR Staff

Leading the HR staff to become a true business partner is one of the most important leadership roles for HR professionals. Demonstrating the behaviors to be a strong HR leader is one of the best training tools for the HR leader. In their book The Extraordinary Leader: Turning Good Managers into Great Leaders,⁴ Jack Zenger and Joseph Folkman studied the strengths and weaknesses of HR leaders and concluded the following:

Strong HR leaders demonstrate the following behaviors:

•   Develop and coach others

•   Build positive relationships

•   Model their values and fulfill their promises and commitments

•   Have functional expertise

Weak HR leaders display these behaviors:

•   Focus internally rather than externally, failing to look outside the HR function to the organization’s internal and external stakeholders

•   Lack strategic perspective, focusing on short-term objectives and daily tasks

•   Do not anticipate or react well to change

•   Resist “stretch” goals and act as a drag on the organization’s attempts to innovate

As an HR professional, consider what your own leadership style is and where you may need to shore up a leadership skill to lead the HR department more effectively so that you and HR can have a more significant role in your organization.

Facilitating Strategic Change

Facilitating strategic change as an HR leader involves employing the three Cs of change leadership.

•   Communicate Unsuccessful leaders tended to focus on the “what” behind the change. Successful leaders communicated the “what” and the “why.” Leaders who explained the purpose of the change and connected it to the organization’s values or explained the benefits created stronger buy-in and urgency for the change.

•   Collaborate Bringing people together to plan and execute change is critical. Successful leaders worked across boundaries, encouraged employees to break out of their silos, and refused to tolerate unhealthy competition. They also included employees in decision-making early on, strengthening their commitment to change. Unsuccessful change leaders failed to engage employees early and often in the change process.

•   Commit Successful leaders made sure their own beliefs and behaviors supported change, too. Change is difficult, but leaders who negotiated it successfully were resilient and persistent and willing to step outside their comfort zone. They also devoted more of their own time to the change effort and focused on the big picture. Unsuccessful leaders failed to adapt to challenges, expressed negativity, and were impatient with a lack of results.

Serving as the Voice for HR

There is a new agenda for HR in today’s business environment, and it is a radical departure from the status quo. It used to be that HR was charged with mainly playing policy police and regulatory watchdog, handling the volumes of paperwork involved in hiring and firing, managing the bureaucratic aspects of benefits, and administering compensation decisions made by others. HR’s activities were often disconnected from the real work of the organization. Today HR is defined not by what it does but by what it delivers—results that enrich the organization’s value to customers, stakeholders, and employees.

Serving as the voice for HR, more organizations have dispersed their staff as HR business partners in the business units to be closely aligned with the needs of that particular business unit so that HR can help deliver organizational excellence in the following four ways:

•   Become a true business partner within the unit with line management in strategy execution

•   Become an expert in the way work is organized and executed, delivering administrative efficiency

•   Become a champion for employees, representing their concerns to line management and at the same time working to increase employee contribution and engagement

•   Become an agent of continuous transformation, shaping processes and a culture that together improve the organization

Ensuring Accountability

As an HR leader, modeling desired behavior and outcomes with the HR staff is vitally important to other employees and management in the organization. When leaders are visibly holding their own direct reports accountable, this sends a powerful leading-by-example message. People struggle to be accountable when roles and processes are ambiguous; thus, having clear roles, responsibilities, and expectations is a vital step in holding others accountable. As an HR professional, how well are you measuring up to doing what you say you are going to do and by when? Holding yourself accountable to delivering the outcomes and the outlined leadership behavior norms is just as important.

Changing Organizational Culture

When embarking on changing organizational culture, the first step is in defining the values and behaviors you’re seeking to change. Culture is defined as the beliefs and behaviors that govern how people act in an organization, and it is now believed to be a major determinant of a company’s success or failure. Culture is considered a potential competitive advantage, if it is perceived as a positive strong culture.

According to the Deloitte Global Human Capital Trends 2016⁵ report, here are ten tips for driving a culture change:

•   Define desired values and behaviors.

•   Align culture with strategy and processes.

•   Connect culture and accountability.

•   Have visible proponents.

•   Define the non-negotiables.

•   Align your culture with your brand.

•   Measure your efforts.

•   Don’t rush it.

•   Invest now.

•   Be bold and lead.

Championing the HR Function

To champion the HR function, HR professionals must build relationships that are known as a reliable expert partner that champions high performance from the workforce.

To champion high performance from the workforce, HR’s functions must be deliberately designed to support and be directly linked to the organization’s mission, vision, strategy, and goals. When HR is seen as the lever that drives performance upward, then HR lives up to its potential as the most important function in every organization.

Creating Buy-In for Organizational Change

When you’re enacting an organizational change, organizational executives most likely already gave a green light for the change you’re heading up. You need to create more buy-in for other levels in the organization to help proceed with the change. The following are steps to take to create buy-in.

Working from the Top Down   In addition to obtaining buy-in from the C-suite, consider bringing in mid-level management into the change plans early on. Gaining support from leaders at different levels in the organization will make your pitch stronger and ensure managers have time to prepare for questions from employees from the get go.

Being Transparent   Communication is key to prevent unfounded concerns and gossip about how the change is going to affect people. Be open and transparent early and often. This includes being clear about what’s going well and what’s not working. Be up-front and specific about what failed throughout the process and was learned.

Asking for Input   It’s vital for employees to know their opinions and ideas are being acknowledged when voiced. It can prove to be a challenge to collect and address feedback and questions from everyone. Think of having a task force within each unit to help you communicate details and gather feedback at certain phases of the change process.

Change is key to helping organizations innovate and grow, and your organization’s workforce is the needed component for helping changes take place. Ensuring they’re informed and can provide input throughout the change transition is essential in earning their support.

Summary

In this portion of Chapter 7, we explored the expertise in leadership and navigation that enables HR professionals to keep their organizations focused on its strategies and goals to lead the workforce talent by creating collaboration and fostering a vision with influence, EQ, and motivation.

Behavioral Competency 2—Ethical Practice

It is important for HR professionals to understand the demand for ethical practice. Everyone expects a level playing field, and that requires employers to be doing what is expected for employees, customers, and shareholders.

Three subcompetencies comprise the Ethical Practice competency. They are defined by SHRM⁶ as follows:

•   Personal integrity Demonstrating high levels of integrity in personal relationships and behaviors

•   Professional integrity Demonstrating high levels of integrity in professional relationships and behaviors

•   Ethical agent Cultivating the organization’s ethical environment and ensuring that policies and practices reflect ethical values

Key Concepts

•   Ethical business principles and practices (e.g., transparency, confidentiality, conflicts of interest)

•   Anonymity, confidentiality, and privacy principles and policies

•   Codes of conduct

Definition

According to SHRM, “Ethical Practice is defined as the ability to integrate core values, integrity, and accountability throughout all organizational and business practices.”⁷

Personal integrity is a personal choice to uphold certain moral and ethical standards. Professional integrity defines the professional who consistently and willingly practices within the guidelines of a chosen profession under the obligation of a code of ethics. Ethical agent means someone who, with strong internal guidance, practices ethical behavior.

What Are Ethics?

Ethics are the rules or standards that govern conduct of individuals within a profession. They are based on a moral philosophy. That philosophy holds that there are differences between right and wrong or good and bad. Ethics are the standards people use to guide their decision-making with the intent that outcomes are fair to those involved.

Unethical behavior is that which is inconsistent with the stated values, norms, and beliefs of the organization’s stakeholders.

Proficiency Indicators for All HR Professionals

Ethical practice for all HR professionals relies on these key behaviors. All HR professionals are expected to conduct themselves according to these requirements. SHRM has published a professional Code of Ethics for HR professionals. You will find it at https://www.shrm.org/about-shrm/Pages/code-of-ethics.aspx. It is something you should read, understand, and follow in your daily job.

Maintaining Confidentiality

Confidentiality refers to data. Privacy refers to people. So, recognizing that HR professionals work frequently with confidential information, maintaining that confidential status is critical. Handling such information requires respect for the intimate and classified nature of the information. Keeping those secrets is an expectation of all HR professionals.

Acting with Personal, Professional, and Behavioral Integrity

Personal conduct of HR professionals must meet a standard as high or higher than others are expected to meet. Integrity is the inner expectation people have for themselves that causes them to act in accordance with a code. That code expects honesty and forthrightness in all activities. Frequently, organizations publish written ethics codes, specifying exactly the expectations that exist for personal behavior.

Responding Immediately to All Reports of Unethical Behavior or Conflicts of Interest

When other people are suspected of acting unethically, it is up to the HR professional to react with appropriate challenges. That may involve a formal investigation or a simple coaching of the individual involved. Doing nothing is not an appropriate option.

Empowering All Employees to Report Unethical Behavior or Conflicts of Interest Without Fear of Reprisal

Employees at all levels must feel welcome to report observations of unethical behavior exhibited by others, even their bosses. If employees don’t feel safe in doing so, it becomes a cancer that can grow and consume the organization over a short period of time.

Showing Consistency Between Espoused and Enacted Values

Everyone in the organization must be able to witness the leaders doing what they demand of others. Organizational values are valid only if they are supported by daily decisions from the executive suite. People notice those things and will be slow to support values that are not supported by executives. “Do as I say, not as I do,” doesn’t work.

Acknowledging Mistakes

Denial is a reaction that may work in court, but it rarely proves helpful in the employment context. If an HR professional has made an error, it is always preferable to admit the mistake and extend an offer to correct it. Most of us appreciate people who admit that they have goofed. We don’t so much appreciate someone stonewalling us. Building confidence and trust in the HR department depends on people admitting and correcting mistakes when they happen.

Driving the Corporate Ethical Environment

Charles D. Kerns writes in Pepperdine University’s Graziadio Business Review,⁸ “Values drive behavior and therefore need to be consciously stated, but they also need to be affirmed by actions. Driving ethical behavior with values and attitudes requires that there be alignment among values, attitudes, and behavior.” Table 7-1 shows examples of this alignment between each of the virtuous values, associated attitudes, and behavior.

Table 7-1     Values, Attitude, and Ethics and How They Relate

Applying Power or Authority Appropriately

Abusing power is the shortest route to violate a trust. If employees are to trust and support an employer organization, the leaders must wield power and authority appropriately and with discretion. Decisions must be made in ways that support the employment relationship rather than undermining it. Power can be corrupting; successful HR professionals are people who understand the concepts of fairness and equality.

Mitigating the Influence of Bias

Perhaps the most difficult image to see is the self-image. We tend to see ourselves as we think we are rather than as others see us. That is simply human nature. It is important for HR professionals to make special efforts to seek feedback from those they interact with so they can make adjustments to their behavior that may be appropriate. Identifying personal bias is not always easy. Once identified, assuring that personal bias doesn’t influence business decisions is even more difficult. It is not uncommon for individuals to create justifications for their decisions that deny impact of personal bias when in actuality bias is driving the decision. Bias is ingrained and can come from personal experiences reaching back into childhood. Once treated unfairly by someone in a particular group (e.g., race, gender, age, disability), the sense of ill treatment carries over into future relationships and decision-making.

Maintaining Appropriate Levels of Transparency in Organizational Practices

As it has been used in recent times, applied to organizations, transparency means the opposite of secrecy. Related to HR professionals, transparency means making information available to employees, stakeholders, and even sometimes the public, to explain policy changes and even benefit issues. The latest legislative push has been directed at compensation transparency. That means employers are required to permit employees to discuss their compensation openly and that of others in the group. In the private sector, such discussions have been generally prohibited historically. Expectations have changed. Openness is now the order of the day. In truth, such openness makes it more difficult to cover up differences in pay between men and women in the same job or how job schedules are assigned to a racially mixed group of workers.

Ensuring That All Stakeholder Voices Are Heard

An obvious prerequisite is the identification of all stakeholders for the organization. Then, as issues arise, reach out to each for input to the discussion. The downside of not doing this is that people will feel left out and ignored. None of us wants to be ignored. Invite participation and input.

Managing Political and Social Pressures when Making Decisions

HR professionals are in the unique position of brokering compromise between opposite views on issues such as benefits versus budget restrictions, cultural celebration versus production requirements, and confidentiality of records versus transparency of investigation outcomes. There are always going to be pressures from those of higher rank in the organization and sometimes from outside social standings. Many employers are being pressured to permit employee use of recreational marijuana while federal law continues to hold the substance illegal. Reconciling these differences is often the job of the HR professional. Sometimes, it takes the wisdom of Solomon.

There comes a time in most people’s lives when there is pressure from a supervisor, manager, executive, or other influential player who would have you do something unethical. While the action may not be illegal, you recognize it as crossing the line on ethics. The question is, “What will you choose to do?” Going against the wishes of the power-holder may cause you a negative career impact. Agreeing to the unethical action may cause harm to someone else. How you choose to handle that conundrum will determine your personal and professional ethics. Professional HR managers must put their jobs on the line from time to time to stand up for ethics. Remember the military comparison. Just because your boss tells you to shoot someone else, you remain responsible for your own actions. “Because my boss gave me an order” is no excuse for doing something you know is wrong.

Proficiency Indicators for Senior HR Professionals

At the senior level in the profession, ethical practice takes on greater importance because of the impact of the decisions being made. These added elements are additions to the basic ethics requirements for all HR professionals.

Empowering Senior Leaders to Maintain Internal Controls and Create an Ethical Environment to Prevent Conflicts of Interest

Executives must be leaders, but they must also follow policies and values established by the CEO and board of directors. From time to time pressures arise to do something expedient that would actually violate a policy or a corporate value. An example is making an exception to the corporate commitment for equal pay when an executive chooses to hire a highly qualified female candidate at a rate below market value simply because she appears willing to accept a low offer. Such exceptions can undermine the organization’s declaration that it values equal pay treatment for all of its workforce. Senior leaders need to understand they have a responsibility to oppose such violations of values.

Maintaining Contemporary Knowledge

With changes in local, state, and federal laws added to the changes in research about employee management issues, professionals in human resource delivery positions are challenged every day to maintain current knowledge. It is a never-ending process. If you happen to fall behind, your organization’s reputation can suffer, it can lose its ability to recruit top talent, and it can miss important compliance requirements. Maintaining current knowledge is an imperative.

Establishing Credibility

Acceptance at the executive table requires HR professionals to be accepted as credible contributors among organization executives. Credible reputation is based on the ability to inspire belief. Belief is created when experience shows there is more honesty and accuracy than missed expectations. Credibility goes beyond talk and promise. It is based on demonstrated accomplishments.

Challenging Conflicts of Interest

Conflicts of interest occur with more frequency than one might imagine. When the purchasing manager has stock in the vendor organization, there is a potential conflict of interest. When the HR professional has a personal interest in the recasting of a compensation policy because it can result in a substantial pay increase, there is a potential conflict of interest. When the CEO wants to hire her neighbor’s daughter on a summer internship even though the company is laying off workers, there is a potential conflict of interest. These situations should be identified and challenged by the HR professional. Conflicts of interest undermine the organization’s values and can occur at every level of the organization.

Withstanding Pressure when Developing Strategy

One conflict of interest that arises frequently for management people is the interest to protect or grow their slice of the organization. Getting more budget dollars, more headcount, or more time on the executive committee agenda can be strong motivating forces leading to bias in decision-making about organizational policy. HR professionals have the need to constantly be aware of motivations that cause managers and executives to take policy positions. Counteracting such bias takes skill and commitment to the organization’s well-being.

Set the Standard

HR professionals contribute to performance standards by demonstrating behavior that is both legal and ethical. It is hard for employees, let alone managers and supervisors, to follow behavior standards when they see people in HR doing things that violate those standards. If people in HR have poor attendance or tardiness records and suffer no penalty, other departments begin to wonder why they should not also ease up on disciplinary action for the same type of problems in their organization.

Balancing Organizational Success with Employee Advocacy

HR professionals are unique in that they have two masters. The organization relies on HR to help establish and enforce standards and rules. The organization’s employees also rely on HR to be an advocate when there has been inappropriate treatment. Complaints of sexual harassment often put HR into that dual role. The employer depends on HR to help control legal liability by conducting an appropriate investigation, gathering all the evidence available. When the management is actually at fault, employees depend on HR to be honest and bring in an investigation finding that supports their complaint as valid.

Developing HR Policies

One of the most exciting parts of the HR management function is the development of employment policies. In organizations such as government agencies, there are extensive rule books that describe procedures and policies for almost any conceivable requirement. In entrepreneurial organizations, initially there are no policies. They have to be written without the benefit of historical references within the organization. HR professionals get to work with executives to identify policy needs and then draft new policies. They have responsibility for gathering data that compares with alternative policies. Ultimately, data supporting whatever policy is recommended should stand out above other alternatives. Data includes input from executives and managers, analysis of industry standards and expectations, and even competitor policies. Cost analysis or forecasting for each option is often helpful.

Creating HR Strategy

Louise Allen offers this, “Deeper knowledge and understanding of your business goals and business model can identify potential threats and opportunities in the quantity and quality of human resource required by your organization. This in turn identifies the key components of your HR strategy and the virtuous circle of providing whatever your organization needs for success.”⁹ So, once you have your business goals and business model well in hand, the question becomes, “How can we get HR functions to support those business requirements?”

Like any other creative effort, there will likely be multiple drafts and reviews before a final strategy is approved. Remember always that HR has a value-added mission to support the organizational reasons for being if it is to survive as an internal portion of the company. If that isn’t done, executives may decide to outsource the HR functions to someone who will provide the necessary support.

Making Decisions Aligned with Organizational Strategies and Values

Consistency of policy interpretation is critical to employees feeling they are being treated fairly. Americans have an innate belief that employers should treat their workers fairly. “Fair” is not a legal requirement, except for the common law requirement that employers offer “good faith and fair dealing.” Every individual will be carrying around their own measuring tool to assess decisions based on how fair they are. When a decision doesn’t pass the fairness test, discomfort, disgruntlement, and discord soon follow. When one department terminates someone for poor attendance and another department only gives a warning to an employee with a similar attendance record, there will be cries of unfairness. It is up to HR professionals to assure that these opposing conditions don’t happen.

You should be able to write down your organization’s strategies and values. Based on those lists, you may assess the quality of decisions made in any department on any issue.

Communicating the Vision

Once executives have developed and described the organization’s vision, it is up to HR to support and communicate that vision to the workforce. That communication often happens through training sessions. They can be classroom events, online seminars, webinars, or some other form of training. Ultimately, every employee needs to understand and support the vision their leaders put forth. If the vision includes treating employees with dignity, then an open door policy with access to managers and executives on a timely basis may be appropriate. Treating customers with respect may also be part of the vision. Training employees to be courteous in their approach to customers is part of the vision implementation requirement.

Maintaining a Culture of Ethics

“Do as I say and not as I do” doesn’t work very well as an ethical model. People will comply with almost any requirement if they see their superiors also complying with that requirement. If the company doesn’t allow employees to telecommute and it becomes known that managers are telecommuting, a schism develops in the workforce. How serious it is will depend on how many employees find the behavior contrast distasteful and if discipline has resulted in some employee cases. Remember, a perception of fair treatment is a strong requirement in the employment relationship. Lose that, and you may see turnover rates increase.

Aligning All HR Practices

Ethical behavior requires that all interests under the control or influence of HR professionals be joined in the effort to support those ethical decisions. Think about what HR professionals must cover.

•   Legal and regulatory compliance

•   Labor union relationships

•   Employee motivation

•   Employee discipline oversight

•   Global and cultural effectiveness

•   Organizational leadership

•   Support for creation and implementation of organizational vision, mission, policies, and other behavioral expectations

•   Recruiting and hiring

•   Employee training

•   Diversity programs

•   Workforce leadership and coaching managers on leadership issues

•   Oversight of ethical expectations

•   Employee communication

•   Consultation on business decisions representing the employee viewpoint

•   Periodical review of employee programs to assure effectiveness

Usually, on the job, several of these areas of HR influence will be in play at the same time. Balancing them with one another is an expectation of a certified HR professional.

Summary

In this portion of Chapter 7, we explored ethical requirements for HR professionals. Ethics permeates each segment of HR duties and responsibilities. If HR managers don’t demonstrate personal and organizational integrity, employees are likely to also demonstrate absence of integrity. Transparency, honesty, and confidentiality are key components of an effective ethics program. For some people, ethics is simply doing the right thing in each circumstance. For others, ethics represents compliance with professional standards of conduct. Every day, an HR professional is likely to encounter one or more ethics dilemmas. How you react to those problems will determine what your organizational culture really is, not what you claim it is. Decision-making is integral to ethics requirements. It starts with the most senior executive and then applies to each subordinate manager, supervisor, and employee.

HR professional behavioral standards are expected to conform to the HR Professional Code of Ethics, published by SHRM.¹⁰ Key components of the code include the following:

•   Professional responsibility

•   Professional development

•   Ethical leadership

•   Fairness and justice

•   Conflicts of interest

•   Use of information

Interpersonal Cluster

The Interpersonal cluster represents 18.5 percent of both exams’ weighted scores. There are three competencies that fall within the Interpersonal cluster.

•   Behavioral Competency 3—Relationship Management

•   Behavioral Competency 4—Communication

•   Behavioral Competency 5–Global and Cultural Effectiveness

This cluster covers the behaviors, attributes, and knowledge required for HR professionals to perform collaboratively and with interpersonal aspects of their roles.

Behavioral Competency 3—Relationship Management

HR’s most notable role has been, and continues to be, the “people” job; therefore, managing relationships is a core function for an HR professional. Those who are good at using their relationship skills will foster greater collaboration, understanding, and communication with stakeholders.

Five subcompetencies comprise the Relationship Management competency. They are defined by SHRM¹¹ as follows:

•   Networking Effectively building a network of professional contacts both within and outside of the organization

•   Relationship building Effectively building and maintaining relationships both within and outside of the organization

•   Teamwork Participating as an effective team member that builds, promotes, and leads effective teams

•   Conflict management Managing and resolving conflicts by identifying areas of common interest among the parties in conflict

•   Negotiation Reaching mutually acceptable agreements with negotiating parties within and outside of the organization

Key Concepts

•   Types of conflict (e.g., relationship, task, inter- and intra-organizational)

•   Conflict-resolution styles (e.g., avoidance, competition, cooperation, conciliation)

•   Conflict-resolution techniques (e.g., accommodate, avoid, collaborate)

•   Negotiation, tactics, strategies, and styles (e.g., perspective taking, principled bargainer, auction, interest-based bargaining)

Definition

According to SHRM, “Relationship Management is defined as the knowledge, skills, abilities, and other characteristics (KSAOs) needed to create and maintain a network of professional contacts within and outside of the organization, to build and maintain relationships, to work as an effective member of a team, and to manage conflict while supporting the organization.”¹²

Basic Proficiency Indicators

All HR professionals must be able to establish and maintain positive relationships with people both inside and outside the organization. HR touches all parts of the employer organization and reaches into a myriad of external groups. Each of those contacts requires positive relationships with the people there.

Establishing Credibility

Without credibility, the HR professional has little to offer. Seen as someone who can’t be relied on to offer accurate information and advice, the HR professional will find internal managers avoiding them. You must be the “go-to” expert on all matters involving human resources. That means when you don’t know an answer, say so and promise to do the necessary research and get back to your contact with accurate information. Do it in a timely way because help that is delayed often is not any help at all. Managers need information quickly so they can deal with the issues they have facing them. Remember, it takes only one incident where you give bad advice and your reputation is damaged. It will take a long time to get it back on the positive side.

Treating Stakeholders with Respect and Dignity

As an HR professional, you have many stakeholders. We reviewed them in Chapter 5. However, remember all organizational employees fall into that category. And all managers within the organization fall into that category. Don’t forget your boss. Your boss is a stakeholder, too. Some of these folks will be delightful to work with. Some of them will be difficult to work with. Each of them deserves your respect for the role they play and the person they are. Your job as an HR professional is to treat each individual with dignity. Even if there is someone who has committed a firing offense and you are helping the supervisor terminate them, being kind can go a long way toward decent treatment. Ask yourself each time, “How would I like to be treated?” Then do that. No one deserves to be belittled or shamed for any reason. Even if you have to call the police to deal with a serious behavior issue, you can still be an adult in your approach to that person who is causing the problem.

Building Engaging Relationships

Building relationships is a skill HR people must develop. Some people do it naturally, and others have to work at it. Here are some suggestions from an expert in communication.

Demonstrating Approachability

How do you feel when you walk up to someone and they don’t recognize you? Perhaps they continue their current conversation or, worse, actually turn away from you. It hurts when people don’t acknowledge you. Others feel the same when we treat them in those ways. While it isn’t always easy, particularly with people who are known to be difficult to work with, it is important for HR people to treat others with professionalism. Being discourteous is a sure way to become known as someone who cannot be approached easily.

Ensuring Alignment with HR Strategy

Without doubt, HR strategy will embrace employees, managers, suppliers, customers, and perhaps even stockholders. Each of these groups is important to the successful achievement of the company goals. Strategy is the way those goals will be accomplished. And people are always going to be the force that implements the strategy. There is a direct link to strategic completion of goals with the relationships that can cause that to happen. HR professionals touch each of the stakeholder groups along the way. It is therefore critical that HR professionals be conscious of how they impact their relationships and thus the impact they have on strategic implementation of action plans.

Providing Customer Service

Customers in the corporate sense are those people external to the organization who buy our products or services. They are the clients of governments and nonprofits who receive services. Customers and how we provide for them are the reasons that our organizations exist. Without customers we wouldn’t have need for an HR organization.

For HR, our customers are our organizational employees and managers. We provide the products (e.g., insurance programs, career pathing) and services (e.g., complaint investigations, onboarding) that our customers rely on. How we service these people will determine their view of the HR group, not to mention the individuals within that group. If HR is always telling people, “You can’t do that,” it won’t be long before the phones in the HR department stop ringing. People don’t like hearing, “You can’t do that.” They much prefer hearing, “Let’s see what we can do.” Then explore with the employee and/or supervisor what is possible and what isn’t. Your employee will leave with a more positive feeling having received an explanation of the reasons behind each option or prohibition. You will have provided good customer service, even if the employee didn’t get exactly what was requested.

Promoting Successful Relationships

These are some basic methods for promoting successful relationships:

•   Help employees understand organizational goals and strategies for achieving them.

•   Give each employee an understanding about how they personally can contribute to achieving those goals.

•   Acknowledge positive accomplishments when they are extraordinary.

•   Showcase employee achievements in organizational publications, including the employer web site.

•   Say “thank you” when people do the right thing.

•   Compliment the boss for achievements of people in the group.

Managing Internal and External Relationships

Internal relationships take the form of employee and management encounters. Often HR is serving these people in some way. Managing those relationships can be best accomplished by offering a positive experience, even if the message HR is required to deliver is not one people want to hear. How it is delivered, its tone, and its level of kindness will go a long way to preserving the relationships.

External relationships exist with shareholders, regulators, enforcement agencies, media contacts, and even membership in community service clubs like Rotary, Kiwanis, and Lyons. Knowing what information can be shared and responding when appropriate will establish positive relationships with each of these groups. There is an expectation that HR professionals are “the face of the corporation” whenever someone is dealing with you in an official capacity. Even if you are on a community baseball team, you carry the flag of your employer organization. People see you as the official representative of that employer. You are an agent in that regard. You carry a large burden when that happens. You must be ready to carry it with pride and professionalism.

Championing Organizational Effectiveness

Being a cheerleader for effectiveness in your organization is another role you must play as an HR professional. When you see things that aren’t working because of organizational structure or “red tape,” it is incumbent upon you to intervene and suggest change. That can be a bit tricky when people have a sense of “owning” the portion of the organization that isn’t working well. Working with your HR boss to identify means for influencing improvements is often a good way to approach the situation. This is another area where spotlighting success is a great way to get other people to agree to do something similar in the future when similar problems exist.

Serving as an Advocate

Employees need an advocate sometimes. When there are policy issues that need attention and large groups of employees are providing feedback that the current policy is inadequate or no longer applicable to the times, HR is responsible for consolidating those employee views and presenting them to senior management. When a discrimination complaint is filed and investigation suggests the manager is at fault, HR is the entity that will usually be responsible for providing the feedback and advocating for a remedy on behalf of the employee. Sure, there is always a need to act as an advocate for what is right. But there are also circumstances that call for an advocate when people just need to be heard. Potentially unsafe working conditions that have yet to be recognized by management can be a reason for HR’s involvement. One employee working alone may not be as effective as when HR becomes an advocate for employees in general to deal with the problem.

Fostering Team Building

HR sometimes provides team building training and facilitation programs. And sometimes HR researches and recommends outside vendors for such programs. Every day, HR can support team building by recognizing team accomplishments. Offering rewards for team accomplishments can be effective, and providing acknowledgment and thanks for those accomplishments can be equally effective. An important HR role in fostering team building is in guiding supervisors on effective behaviors for high-performing teams, helping them create internal team cultures that include high trust, common vision, team unity, and accountability.

Building a Network of Contacts

Effective HR professionals will have a notebook full (or cell phone contact list full) of contacts who can help with the wide range of HR problems that can come up from day to day. Who do you call when you need a contact for employee assistance programs, workers’ compensation reimbursement problems, or addiction rehabilitation programs? Who can help you set up an employee relocation program or provide in-home medical care following a difficult surgery? Each day another issue will come up, and you will be faced with having to do some research to determine what contact will help you solve your problem with or for the employee. Over time, all those vetted contacts will combine to represent a large database of references when you need to use them again.

Proficiency Indicators for Senior HR Professionals

Beyond the basic proficiency indicators are found behaviors that senior HR professionals are challenged to master.

Designing Metrics

Senior HR managers are usually involved in establishing the measurements that will indicate how they and their department are doing in their job of serving employees. Whether it’s computing turnover rates or revenue to expense ratios, there are some critical aspects of HR management that should be measured. Those measurements provide feedback to the HR department but also offer reassurance to the senior executive team that HR is accomplishing its key goals as it has said it would. Designing those measurements (metrics) is a way for HR to demonstrate it is willing to be accountable for its own accomplishments. All other portions of the employer organization are measured in some ways, so, too, should the HR department.

Networking

Developing a professional network outside the organization is as important as maintaining healthy relationships with managers and employees inside the company. Other senior HR professionals at other industry organizations can help suggest solutions to problems you are having that they have already solved. As cultural norms evolve, other HR professionals can provide sounding boards for policy questions and benefit program adjustments. Maintaining a professional network of HR friends is more and more important as time goes on. Not everyone can solve all of the problems. Relying on help from other professionals is an effective way to leverage your time and resources.

Championing Customer Service

While it is a basic HR behavior to champion organizational effectiveness, it is an advanced behavior to champion customer service. Sometimes it is necessary to fight for employee treatment when budget dollars must be allocated. Adding a new paid day off to the offering will expand budget expense by a certain amount. What will be the offsetting benefit to the corporation for making that extra offering? Identifying the business needs is first. Then comes the presentation and response to executive questions about your recommendations. Serving your customers is an important role for you as an HR professional.

Negotiating with Stakeholders

It is not only employees we deal with. You will interact frequently with vendors of insurance programs, with union representatives, with state and federal enforcement agencies, and at executive HR levels with the board of directors. All are stakeholders in how an organization is run. From time to time, you will have a need to negotiate with each one. For example, changing working condition provisions in a union contract can be calculated to have a dollar impact on the budget. Settling discrimination complaints and workers’ compensation cases with outside agencies will also have budget impact. Establishing a new policy sometimes requires approval of the board of directors. Persuading them to adopt the new policy is often also an exercise in convincing them to accept the budget impact it will cause.

If you are in an organization that bills its HR costs back to internal client departments, there will be negotiations to support and justify those billings. You will be called upon to discuss your department’s performance on a regular basis.

Designing a Customer Service Culture

When HR workers arrive at work each day knowing that they will be expected to provide great customer service, that will be what happens most of the time. It is necessary to create a sense that providing outstanding customer service is “just the way we do things around here.” When your HR department believes that, and behaves collectively to deliver that, your internal clients will be happy, and your boss will be happy.

Forbes published a list of key customer service action plan items for those who have yet to develop your own program.¹³

•   Articulate your central philosophy in a few meaningful words. “The needs of our patients come first.”

•   Distill a list of your core values. Identify how customers, employees, and vendors should be treated at all times.

•   Reinforce your commitment to these values constantly. Do this daily or weekly, not annually.

•   Make it visual. Put your values on all e-mails, stationary, vehicles, and in-customer packages.

•   Make your philosophy the focus of orientation. Make sure your employee orientation messages are reinforced by actual work experiences.

•   Train, hire, support, and if necessary discipline to enforce what’s important. Be sure the messages are consistent.

Creating Conflict-Resolution Strategies

Put two people together in a working environment, and eventually there will be some level of conflict. Put many people together, and those conflicts will happen frequently. According to SHRM,¹⁴ “The human resource team has a leadership responsibility to develop and implement workplace conflict policies and procedures and to create and manage conflict-resolution programs. HR also initiates employee communication on conflict and tracks the metrics and costs of conflict-resolution efforts. Many HR professionals receive conflict-resolution training, often as part of their professional development, and many are accustomed to conducting such training or enlisting outside training resources for supervisors and managers.

“HR professionals often become involved in settling workplace conflicts, particularly if the employees and their supervisors cannot achieve a resolution. If HR cannot resolve a conflict, an outside specialist may be needed to work out a settlement.”

Overseeing HR Decision-Making Processes

The entire HR department must be capable of making decisions that are consistent with legal requirements and also company policy. Documentation of those decisions is essential if the employer will be able to defend its actions at some later time. Then, it is necessary to train managers and supervisors to make good decisions and properly document them. Managers and supervisors hate documentation. It takes time that they don’t believe they have. And some just hate writing anything. HR is accountable for overcoming those impediments and assuring that the proper standards are met.

Developing Strategic Relationships

Remember, relationships both inside and outside the organization can be strategic. That means they can help you meet your corporate goals. The senior HR professional is responsible for developing relationships that can contribute to those strategies. Think in terms of the insurance program representatives for health care and long-term disability care. How about life insurance, employee assistance contractors, relocation moving companies, and HRIS software vendors? Each of these is an important relationship that senior HR managers must develop and maintain.

Fostering Intra-organizational Culture

Encouraging understanding other of cultures is something HR can facilitate for others in the organization. International interests are obviously going to require such action and support. But within the employee group, there are more and more cultural backgrounds added to our populations. Embracing and supporting the integration of those cultures into your employee body is an important role for senior HR managers. Working with employee affinity groups can help achieve that goal. Those might include women engineers, Hispanic managers, or Black technical professionals just as examples. Hosting meetings of employees who come from outside the United States can help make people feel more comfortable in their new surroundings. Helping them understand how to contribute their cultural features to problem-solving at the company will go a long way to expanding the warm welcome you want them to feel.

Designing Strategic Opportunities

HR should have a prominent attachment to each of the corporate strategic action items. Even if HR is not specifically mentioned, the link to HR must be identified by the senior HR executive. HR must then develop its own strategic plan for supporting those links. Just how that will happen is the process of designing strategic opportunities. You must be creative and invent ways that you can support your customers in other departments. You must identify ways to actively support their strategic goals by connecting them back to the HR functions. Those actions on your part will prove to your colleagues in other departments that you stand ready to support them as a business partner and that you will help them succeed in their goals.

Proactively Developing Relationships

It does no good to sit on the sidelines and wait for someone to come to your office with a request for help. You have to actively extend yourself to your customers. Offer to attend their departmental staff meetings so you can help people understand the new policies or benefit programs. Help them understand how the new health care laws or income taxes will impact them. Providing information to employees will help your client managers maintain a calm work environment for their employees. Upset only grows through lack of factual input. You can help alleviate such upset by extending your offer to participate personally.

Proactively developing external relationships is also important. Getting to know your vendors and learning about the way they do business can help you analyze how you use them now and in the future. The objective in all relationships is to be well enough acquainted so that when necessary you can pick up the phone and discuss whatever business problem you face.

Summary

You now know about the behavioral competency of Relationship Management. You learned that establishing and maintaining relationships is critical to the HR mission and purpose in an organization. Supporting stakeholders in reaching the strategic goals of the organization can make those achievements less painful and more rewarding.

Behavioral Competency 4—Communication

Being an effective communicator is one of the most important building blocks to a successful career in HR. First, career-level HR professionals will need to hone their oral and written communication skills to handle employee and candidate communications, grievances, and training and presentations, along with investigations. More senior-level HR professionals will require a higher level of communication skills that will be used in developing presentations, programs, policies, and various analysis or other outcomes, along with interactions with a variety of internal and external stakeholders.

Three subcompetencies comprise the Communication competency. They are defined by SHRM¹⁵ as follows:

•   Delivering messages Developing and delivering to a variety of audiences communications that are clear, persuasive, and appropriate to the topic and situation

•   Exchanging organizational information Effectively translating and communicating messages among organizational levels of units

•   Listening Understanding information provided by others

Key Concepts

•   Elements of communication (e.g., source, sender, receiver, message feedback)

•   General communication techniques (e.g., planning communications, active listening)

•   Communication techniques for specialized situations (e.g., giving feedback, facilitating focus groups, facilitating staff meetings)

•   Communications media (e.g., phone, e-mail, face-to-face, report, presentation, social media)

Definition

According to SHRM, “Communication is defined as the knowledge, skills, abilities, and other characteristics (KSAOs) needed to effectively craft and deliver concise and informative communications, to listen to and address the concerns of others, and to transfer and translate information from one level or unit of the organization to another.”¹⁶

Proficiency Indicators for All HR Professionals

All HR professionals are expected to conduct themselves according to the following behaviors associated with the competency of Communication:

Communicating Clarity

Communication is a vital and critical change management element. To be effective with change management in any leadership position within an organization, and especially in the HR function, will require over-communication to ensure that everyone hears and embraces a message, that they will understand the message and act accordingly. The basics of a communication model is simply:

Who is the Communicator → Says what Message → in what way Medium used → to whom Intended Receiver → with what effect Feedback

Whether the communication is spontaneous (someone dropping into your office) or carefully planned out (all-hands meeting), the same model is applied in order to ensure impactfulness. At each step of the model, something can go south, derailing the intent or purpose of the communication. Clarity of what is intended to be communicated is absolutely of high importance in HR communications—whether they be planned communications or the informal, spontaneous type. A communicator’s ability to be clear builds their credibility and helps avoid rumor mills or “noise” within an organization.

Kouzes and Posner, in their book The Leadership Challenge,⁵⁶ described the following behaviors that contribute to the “credibility factor” with communicators:

•   Accuracy, derived from their expertise and preparation

•   Consistency

•   Reliability, doing what a person says they will do

•   Courage to disagree when appropriate and necessary

•   Integrity

•   Creativity

•   Maintaining confidentiality

•   Creating an atmosphere that is comfortable

Listening

Effective communicators are excellent listeners. They can interpret and confirm what is being said and use this content to drive the conversation further—for example, through follow-up questions such as, “If I understood what you told me, you feel that the records are incorrect. What makes you think they are incorrect?”

Communicators must also be good observers of nonverbal messages. They can promote a more open and better discussion by using a nonthreatening manner to draw in a person who may be indicating resistance to speak (e.g., sitting with legs crossed and arms are crossed high, perhaps with a scowl on the face). Use an open-ended question that may sound to the receiver as agreement, to help elicit their openness, for example, “Chris, you would be probably one of the best people to ask this question due to your length of time in your job. What do you believe I should review?” Listening has another big benefit in communications too. Focused, authentic attention builds trust and goodwill with others, allowing you to get to the heart of what really matters.

Delivering Critical Information

The delivery of a message, especially critical messages, involves choosing the communication channel that best fits the message and the intended receiver’s needs, along with a delivery style that supports the receiver’s understanding of the message. Timing plus anticipation of the intended receiver’s reactions are important considerations. Circling the wagon and not getting to the core point of the message within the first couple of sentences is highly ineffective. When delivering critical information, get to the factual point quickly. An example would be: “Lee, the ABC project deadline for Friday is not going to be met by my analysis and observation. I believe that if we switch Jan from the implementation group over to the analytics, we have a better chance of making a Monday deadline if we have everyone work overtime 2 hours each night next week.”

Providing Constructive Feedback

In constructive feedback, you need to consider ways to be precise but also help the person to hear and apply the feedback. This can be done by framing the message in terms of the ultimate goal of the activity, what is lacking, and what specifically needs improving and what improvement would look like.

The following might be made in a coaching session aimed at helping a manager improve their ability to conduct discipline meetings:

“You want Jim to know the reason for the meeting and the outcomes. I’ve observed that when Jim rambles at length and repetitively about various excuses, you lose focus on the point that he’s not meeting quota and what Jim has to do to correct his quota deficiency. Yes, allow Jim to respond and explain, but keep it short and draw him back to what he can do, what he is accountable for.”

The employee’s understanding of the feedback can be confirmed by asking the employee to demonstrate the performance and/or by observing the employee at work. For example, in the situation described earlier, the HR professional might role-play a meeting with the manager.

Ensuring Effective Communication

Impactful communicators are prepared to shorten their message to key points if the audience is rushed or bored, tailor it if the audience has more trouble understanding or accepting a certain point, or expand the message if the audience shows great interest. They engage their audience with not just their words and supporting documentation but also with their voices and nonverbal body presence. Their gestures are appropriate to the message, such as shaking their heads up and down for positive agreement/understanding or side-to-side to signal a disapproval. They establish eye contact and have vocal qualities that amount to speaking clearly, at a pace and volume that can be heard.

Knowing Your Audience

Understanding an audience’s needs and perspective relies on building awareness of common interest. This requires seeing situations through the eyes of the audience or intended receiver, an essential skill set within Emotional Intelligence. As discussed earlier, knowing how your message will be framed and delivered for understanding and acceptance will help with a communications impactfulness. Consider the audience, their needs, and perspectives when shaping your communication. This is easier with a cognitive and emotional connection.

Leading Meetings

Communication in meetings often focuses on conveying information, receiving updates, soliciting opinions, improving engagements and morale, and coordinating activities. While these are essential communication activities, meetings can become time wasters that are resented by the employees if they are a one-way street and/or are felt to be a waste of their time. All meeting facilitators would well advised to open up their meeting with the purpose and goal of the meeting and why the people present are attending. Here are additional tips for leading effective meetings:

•   Set a clear agenda with defined items. Circulate the agenda before the meeting and specify what individuals may need to do to prepare for the meeting.

•   Allot time according to the agenda and stay within the time limit as a show of respect for others’ time.

•   Start on time. Come early to allow social exchanges that strengthen relationships, but start covering the agenda at the published time.

•   Take time to resolve conflicts, but postpone discussion of conflicts that may be difficult to resolve until after the meeting.

•   Review any decisions and assignments at the meeting’s end.

•   Send an e-mail summary if needed for more complex agendas.

Proficiency Indicators for Senior HR Professionals

Beyond the basic proficiency indicators are the following additional behaviors that senior HR professionals are challenged to master.

Negotiating with Stakeholders

When negotiating with stakeholders, it’s imperative that you begin dialogue with the stakeholder by asking open-ended questions about the issue at hand, their position and perspective, and the desired outcomes they have. The more information you can gather, the better you will understand what is motivating their position, and the more targeted and effective your negotiations will be. By also building an authentic dialogue with the open-ended question, you will be creating a level of trust that will help you work out a deal when a genuine connection is felt. Stakeholders need to feel that you hear and understand their point of view.

Soliciting Feedback

Significant communication events need to be evaluated as soon as possible to determine if the communication has met its objective or failed. Within the change management process, feedback is the phase of communicating that makes sure the desired outcome or action targeted is going to happen. Allowing the audience a question-and-answer period is most helpful after a presentation. Even within a one-in-one communication when delivering critical information, asking for feedback is a wise thing to do (e.g., “Leslie, so I am confident that I communicated everything that I had planned to discuss with you, will you please give me a recap of our discussion and your next actions?”)

A review of what occurred for all major communication initiatives and meetings would include these evaluating questions:

•   Did the intended audience react as anticipated?

•   Was there confusion and, if so, about what?

•   Where did the audience seem most engaged and why?

•   Where did the audience seem least interested?

•   Were the medium and materials used supportive and understood by the audience?

•   What questions were asked? Were there interruptions and when?

Developing Communication Strategies

While not all communications require extensive planning, the costs of not planning are high. Impactful communicators create strategies for critical and/or complex communications. These strategies can include the following considerations:

•   How will the communication take place? Face-to-face? By phone? In writing, using e-mail, text, or other methods? It is going to be difficult to assess the intended receiver’s (or receivers’) reactions when they are not personally in front of you. In these cases, communications should be reviewed by multiple people who can point out areas where there may be ambiguity or potential confusion. Complex topics addressed in presentations usually provide visual support materials that allow the audience to see and digest information, especially those involving numerical data. Discussions about sensitive issues may be conducted best in person or at least by phone or video conference call, rather than by e-mail.

•   When will the communication take place? Some messages require the planning and releasing phases or portions of the message to different groups in a specific sequence. As an HR professional, you need to also consider organizational timing. What other communications might be occurring at this time that can distract from your message?

•   Where will the communication take place? For sensitive discussions, the setting should safeguard confidentiality. For group communication events, the setting should be comfortably accommodating for the group size. Be sure to minimize the risk of distractions and interruptions with sensitive discussions.

•   Who will communicate? Some communications will be better delivered by a presenter with authority in the organization, such as the CHRO. Others require expertise and the ability to respond to technical questions, such as the HRIS manager. Still others require communicators who are adept at listening, understanding an audience’s changing needs, and responding in a positive, unthreatened way, such as the workers’ compensation specialist.

•   What form of media will be used? HR communications should consider the appropriateness of the media used to deliver the messages and intended receiver’s ease with different media types, such as reading level, ability to use and access to technology, and the effects of time zones.

Communicating in various media presents certain challenges and different types of planning. The following table provides the advantages and challenges of various means of communication.

Mastery of Delivery

Framing is often used in discussions of communication. The term reflects the process of getting an audience to see communicated topics and facts in a particular way. Reframing is changing the way an audience sees or feels the intended message. When an HR professional manages an employee’s discouragement over a change in the workplace by pointing out benefits and opportunities for them created by the change, the HR professional is reframing the facts. Effectively framing the message requires clarity and explanation. This in turn requires:

•   Articulating the objective and desired outcome of the communication

•   Identifying the benefit to the intended audience

•   Identifying the key points of the message and placing them in a logical order

•   Providing an explanation for each point that helps the intended audience see these facts in the desired frame

Summary

In this portion of Chapter 7, we discussed the importance of and ability to effectively exchange and communicate information, both oral and written, with stakeholders. When HR information is communicated with clarity and effectiveness, the intended receivers better understand the value and purpose of what is being communicated, be it policies, practices, decisions, or changes. This in turn can have a positive effect with the audiences HR serves, both internal such as employee satisfaction and external such as candidate attraction.

Behavioral Competency 5—Global and Cultural Effectiveness

Even organizations that do not actively participate in direct international exchanges have a stake in how those relationships influence their own organization. What suppliers do does influence the pricing of products used in both manufacturing and as consumers. Follow along as we explore the nuances of a global mind-set in this section. According to SHRM, “In the context of today’s increasingly global workforce, HR professionals must be able to effectively and respectfully interact with colleagues, customers, and clients of varying backgrounds and cultures.”¹⁷

Three subcompetencies comprise the Global and Cultural Effectiveness competency. They are defined by SHRM¹⁸ as follows:

•   Operating in a diverse workplace Demonstrating openness and tolerance when working with people from different cultural traditions

•   Operating in a global environment Effectively managing globally influenced workplace requirements to achieve organizational goals

•   Advocating for a diverse and inclusive workplace Designing, implementing, and promoting organizational policies and practices to ensure diversity and inclusion in the workplace

Key Concepts

•   Cultural intelligence

•   Cultural norms, values, and dimensions (e.g., Hall, Hofstede, Schein, Trompenaars models)

•   Techniques for bridging individual differences and perceptions (e.g., barrier removal, assimilation)

•   Best practices of managing globally diverse workforces

•   Interactions and conflicts of professional and cultural values

Definition

According to SHRM, Global and Cultural Effectiveness is defined “as the knowledge, skills, abilities, and other characteristics (KSAOs) needed to value and consider the perspectives and backgrounds of all parties, to interact with others in a global context, and to promote a diverse and inclusive workplace.”¹⁹

Proficiency Indicators for All HR Professionals

Behaviors all HR professionals should be able to demonstrate include each of the following.

Having a Strong Set of Core Values While Adapting to Conditions, Situations, and People

Appreciating and accepting input from other cultures can be a beneficial management technique. But having a solid foundation in the cultural expectations where we conduct business is paramount. U.S. culture is different from culture in Israel or Chile. Each has its strong points; each can contribute to the success of our enterprise. Yet if you are based in the United States, it is critical for that success to be based on compliance with U.S. requirements and culture.

Maintaining Openness to the Ideas of Others

It only makes sense to take advantage of all the knowledge and abilities other people can offer. So, does it really matter if they are U.S. citizens or from other countries? If they have positive input to the discussions you have about employee issues, shouldn’t you be listening? The answer, of course, is “yes.” There is no expectation that you will accept 100 percent of their input 100 percent of the time. That is no more realistic than taking 100 percent of the input of U.S. employees. But overlooking valuable resources can cause you to fall short of your effectiveness goals.

Demonstrating Nonjudgmental Respect for the Perspectives of Others

By listening more and talking less, you can learn more from other people about their mind-sets. Listening shows respect for what people have to say. It doesn’t obligate anyone to agree with what is being said. It does require strong resistance to preparing rebuttal arguments while pretending to listen. When we listen to others, we can gain the nuggets of value that they have to offer.

Working Effectively with Diverse Cultures and Populations

One of the drivers of our need to communicate across cultures is the ability we now have to work remotely. It is therefore easier to have people participate from distant locations than it used to be. How we communicate effectively with them is now the problem.

Although it is not a cultural issue, time zone differences are a large issue when working with people in other parts of the world. Why? Because of this, there are often delays in responses to phone calls and messaging.

Even within the same language there are sometimes issues because of spelling differences. Labor in U.S. English is spelled labour in Great Britain and Australia. Sometimes that can confuse things. Part of the communication challenge is to be aware of these differences and encourage people to work with them, not change them for their own convenience. Thinking that someone in a different culture is stupid because they can’t spell correctly will block acceptance of any value they have to offer. And believing that someone in a different country is not very smart because they have trouble with vocabulary when speaking English can ignore the fact that they are multilingual. Only about 15 to 20 percent of Americans consider themselves bilingual, compared to 56 percent of Europeans surveyed in 2006 by the European Commission.

Conducting Business with Understanding and Respect for Differences

Our global interactions bring us into contact with customs we may find strange, even unacceptable in our own culture. For example, “Many foreigners new to Saudi Arabia have to adapt to significant limits to public interaction and contact between men and women, even in business environments. Saudi Arabia is one of the most gender-segregated countries in the world. Public places such as shopping malls, restaurants, and the workplace have entire areas that are female-only. Female businesswomen meeting male counterparts in public locations are expected to be accompanied by another male.”²⁰

Appreciating the Commonalities, Values, and Individual Uniqueness of All Humans

We each market ourselves based on our uniqueness. Our language skills, our business background, and our specific skill demonstration all become our self-expression about who we are. If we do that, wouldn’t other people as well? Of course, they do. The trick for HR professionals is to train themselves to recognize, and even encourage, self-expression from others. Getting to know who you deal with is the first stage of developing a healthy relationship. Any sales expert will tell you that it is critical to determine what the customer wants and then speak to that. In HR terms, determining a person’s background, experiences, and cultural influences is important to creating a healthy relationship with them. Find out what is important to people and then speak to that topic, and you will build a long-term relationship.

Possessing the Self-Awareness and Humility to Learn from Others

“JetBlue airlines founder and former CEO, David Neeleman, spent one day each week flying on JetBlue planes, working alongside his crew serving passengers drinks and snacks and cleaning planes between flights. By doing this, Neeleman showed his humility and that work he was expecting others to do well was not beneath him. Result: The word spread about Neeleman’s leadership and helped JetBlue become an employer of choice. Two years after JetBlue was founded, it was growing so fast it needed to hire 2,000 new employees. The company received an astounding 130,000 employment applications!”²¹ Humility is letting your experiences speak for themselves and not believing that you are more important than you are.

Embracing Inclusion

We would all behave with an attitude of inclusiveness if it weren’t for our personal biases. Embracing inclusion begins with recognizing our biases and working to prevent them from blocking other people’s contributions. Racial and religious biases are two of the biggest biases in our population today. To embrace inclusion, we must be able to reach out to people of different races and religions. Even though our laws say that we may not use these group memberships in our employment decisions, the biases we carry can often result in unseen discrimination. As HR professionals, we are responsible for leading the way with our organization’s staff members and getting them to focus on recognizing their own biases. Employment decision-makers must particularly keep these thoughts in the front of their thinking when selecting people for job openings, assigning training opportunities, and making other employment decisions.

Adapting One’s Perspectives and Behaviors to Meet the Cultural Context

In recent times a new term has crept into our lexicon regarding cultural acceptance and inclusion. That term is cultural quotient (CQ). It joins intelligence quotient (IQ) and emotional quotient (EQ) in how we think of people. “CQ is a system consisting of three interactive components: cultural knowledge, cross-cultural skills, and cultural metacognition.”²² Sometimes cultural metacognition is described as cultural mindfulness. This is the ability to recognize cultural context, analyze the cultural issues, and develop strategies to work within them.

Navigating the Differences Between Commonly Accepted Practices and Laws

When meeting someone for the first time in Japan, it is customary to present a small gift. Giving gifts in Germany is usually not done and may even be considered offensive. Gifts are seldom presented in the United Kingdom or Belgium. When conducting business meetings in the Middle East, it is expected that small talk will be exchanged before beginning a business discussion.

There are scores of legal differences between countries of the world. Here are just three areas of labor law that have different expectations.

•   Laws on paid time off Germany and Spain mandate 34 days of paid vacation and holidays for every worker each year, Italy and France require 31 days of paid time off, Belgium and New Zealand require 30 days, Australia mandates 28 days, and Canada’s federal law requires 19 paid days off. Even Japan, which has a reputation for working employees to their limits, requires 10 paid holidays for every worker.²³ In the United States, by contrast, paid time off is mandated only under certain circumstances. For example, states such as California require paid time off for parental leave when the employee has a new child.

•   Laws on paid vacations The United States is the only country with an advanced economy that does not guarantee paid vacation to its workers. In the United States, no company is required to provide paid vacations to employees or pay its employees for federal or state holidays. This is considered an optional employee benefit that employers can choose to provide. The law doesn’t mandate additional pay for employees who work on holidays unless such work is overtime as defined in state and federal law.²⁴ Paid holiday entitlement in the European Union is set at a minimum of 4 weeks (20 days) per year, exclusive of bank holidays; however, many countries are more generous. Sweden, France, and Denmark offer the most, at 5 weeks (25 days) for a standard Monday to Friday job.

•   Laws limiting hours worked In the United States, the Fair Labor Standards Act defines when overtime must be paid and how much that amount will be. There are few upper limits to employees working overtime. In Mexico, the constitution establishes a maximum of 8 work hours for shift workers, a maximum of 7 work hours for the night shift, and a maximum of 9 hours of overtime per week. For every 6 days of work, Mexico’s workers must have 1 day off.

In the European Union, the maximum average working week (including overtime) is capped at 48 hours. The minimum daily rest period is 11 consecutive hours in every 24, and breaks are required when the working day exceeds 6 hours. The European Union requires a minimum weekly rest period of 24 hours plus an 11 hours daily rest period every 7 days.²⁵

If you have employees working in other countries, it is critical that you understand the labor laws in those countries. Payroll requirements are also an obligatory focus for HR professionals.

Operating with a Global Mind-Set

Glen Fisher describes mind-sets as “differing ways that the subject at hand is perceived, understood, and reasoned about.”²⁶ Stephen Rhinesmith says, “A mind-set is a filter through which we look at the world.”²⁷ Being open to all cultural contributions doesn’t mean accepting everything that comes along. Like any problem-solving effort, it is important to establish criteria that represents the filter you will use in identifying the way forward or solution to your problem.

National norms are one thing; local needs may be slightly different. A classic example can be found in holiday observance. The United States generally observes the following federal holidays: New Year’s Day, Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, Presidents Day, Memorial Day, Independence Day, Labor Day, Thanksgiving Day, and Christmas Day. On the local level, Columbus Day in the Eastern portion of the country is an important holiday. Some locations have holidays like Founder’s Day and Armistice (or Veterans) Day. In other countries, the same types of examples can be identified. Walpurgis Night, the Friday After Ascension Day, Mother’s Day, and Father’s Day are celebrated. In Brazil, holiday celebrations include Our Lady of Apparition, All Souls Day, and Public Proclamation Day. Locally, in Rio de Janeiro people celebrate holidays such as Umbanda, the Festival of the Goddess of the Sea, and June Bonfire Festivals (Festas Juninas).

Operating with a Fundamental Trust in Other Humans

Ralph Waldo Emerson said, “Our distrust is very expensive.”²⁸ Without trust, influence wanes, intimacy erodes, relationships crumble, careers derail, organizations fail to prosper (and ultimately, also crumble), and, in short, nothing much works. Wherever trust is missing, opportunity is lost. Opportunity to collaborate, exert influence, deepen intimacy, build understanding, resolve conflict, expand peace, and succeed at the very things that matter most, individually and collectively. It’s why building trust is the foundation of every peace negotiation, every business collaboration, and every truly meaningful endeavor.²⁹

According to Roderick M. Kramer, human beings are predisposed to trust others. And touch is one way we indicate acceptance of trusting another person. The American handshake is one example. It not only says “hello” and “goodbye,” it also says many other things including “I trust we will have a good relationship.”³⁰ Sometimes we are too eager to trust. It is important, Kramer says, to temper our trust with some conscious examination of the circumstances. HR professionals are key players in building trust with stakeholders by demonstrating that HR will do what it says it will do. Making and keeping commitments is part and parcel of a trusting relationship.

Taking the Responsibility to Ensure Inclusion

Respecting individual differences will benefit the workplace by creating a competitive edge and increasing work productivity. Diversity management benefits associates by creating a fair and safe environment where everyone has access to opportunities and challenges. Management tools in a diverse workforce should be used to educate everyone about diversity and its issues, including laws and regulations. Most workplaces are made up of diverse cultures, so organizations need to learn how to adapt to be successful.³¹

Incorporating Global Business and Economic Trends into Business Decisions

Incorporating sustainable development principles into a business’s mission can improve its reputation and regain public trust, increase profit margins, open new business opportunities, and reduce risks associated with less sustainable processes. Businesses are influenced to incorporate sustainable development into supply chains by consumer demand and, in some cases, by investor pressure.³²

HR professionals must be sensitive to economics when analyzing strategies for employee benefits, payroll issues, policy development, and business impact. It is no longer acceptable for HR professionals to work in a vacuum and just make recommendations without support from a business case analysis.

Proficiency Indicators for Senior HR Professionals

In addition to the “basic” behaviors all HR professionals are expected to master, these behaviors are essential for the success of senior HR people.

Setting a Strategy to Leverage Global Competencies for Competitive HR Advantages

More and more today, business leaders are concluding that competency in human resources is a core requirement for success. Are your human resources ready and able to answer key questions like the following?

•   Do you need radical change, or will you move forward with incremental adjustments?

•   Will you “rock the boat” today and add more uncertainty to your strategy, or should you wait until things are more settled?

•   Is it less risky to mitigate the uncertainty of large and complex organizational changes or the potential downside of the status quo?

•   Does your future business need new skills and competences, or are you comfortable with the talent you have today?

Businesses need to answer these questions, and increasingly, HR plays a key role in doing this. Suddenly, HR performance is positioned to influence the overall business performance of a company. HR leaders find themselves under heavy pressure, which calls for new skills, competencies, and profiles across the HR profession. There is also a special focus on HR senior management in charge of driving organizational medium and long-term changes.³³

Using a Global Economic Outlook to Determine Impacts on the Organization’s Human Capital Strategy

Many converging issues are driving the need to rewrite “the rules.” Technology is advancing at an unprecedented rate. Individuals are relatively quick to adapt to ongoing innovations, but organizations move at a slower pace. Many still retain an industrial age structure and practices that are long outdated. Even slower moving are public policy issues such as income inequality, unemployment, immigration, and trade.

It’s these gaps among technology, individuals, businesses, and public policy that are creating a unique opportunity for HR to help leaders and organizations adapt to technology, help people adapt to new models of work and careers, and help the company, as a whole, adapt to and encourage positive changes in society, regulation, and public policy.³⁴

Maintaining Expert Global and Cultural Knowledge/Experience

Learning is a continuous process. It isn’t enough to go to a weeklong course about the culture in the country where your company wants to conduct business. It is necessary to keep up with changes in that culture and in the expectations for legal compliance and customer service. HR staffs should maintain that intercultural knowledge and experience. When someone with those talents moves on to another job, it is necessary to identify a qualified replacement so that the needed components of HR strategic contributions can be maintained.

Maintaining Expert Knowledge of Global Economic Trends

How will the global economy impact the countries in which you do business? What are the economic trends in those countries? Who has the knowledge necessary to deal with these issues? What backups do we have for that key contact person? What role does HR play in educating employees about these trends? Answer these questions, and you will be on your way to being in control of your strategic contributions.

Understanding Global Labor Markets and Associated Legal Environments

International trade and workers’ rights are two of the most complex issues in which HR can get involved. Laws vary widely around the world when focused on employee rights and treatment. Due diligence is necessary if you plan to expand into a new country. Your international labor attorney can become your best friend when that happens. You need to understand the nuances of labor laws in a new country so you can properly adjust the focus of your company’s policies. This is an example of how important HR’s contribution can be to the strategic decision-making process. Identifying workforce-related costs in the new country can contribute to a business decision-making exercise that will determine whether the move will be profitable.

Fostering the Organization’s Cultural Norms

According to SHRM, “(It) is important to have a culture based on a strongly held and widely shared set of beliefs that are appropriately supported by strategy and structure.” That’s a mouthful. It means that culture evolves from shared beliefs. And if those beliefs are not supported by strategy and organizational structure (e.g., reporting relationships), the beliefs will ring hollow with employees and others outside the organization.

If a company says, “We believe in customer service at the highest level” and then doesn’t behave as though customer service is important, the culture will wind up being based on poor customer service. Managers who say “People are our most important asset” and then cut into policies affecting working schedules and job assignments will have a decided impact on the organization’s culture. It isn’t what we say that impacts culture as much as what we do.

Proving the ROI of a Diverse Workforce

The consulting firm McKinsey & Company conducted some studies related to the question of return on investment from corporate diversity efforts.³⁵

•   Companies in the top quartile for racial and ethnic diversity are 35 percent more likely to have financial returns above their respective national industry medians.

•   Companies in the top quartile for gender diversity are 15 percent more likely to have financial returns above their respective national industry medians.

Managing Contradictory Practices to Ensure Cross-Cultural Harmony and Organizational Success

If you accept the definition of culture as the patterns of behavior and beliefs shared by a group, then you can examine the impacts of those behaviors within the group. When cultures clash (e.g., religious dress codes, beards, or holiday observance), HR professionals are usually called upon to intercede and find some common-ground resolution that will fit for the entire organization. Doing so respects individual cultural expectations while preserving the employer’s need to get work done.

How these conflicts are resolved usually involves gathering data from individuals and examining what common ground exists between conflicting viewpoints. Involving those same individuals in discussions about the issues, with HR playing the facilitation role, can often result in acceptance of the common ground as a way forward.

Integrating Perspectives on Cultural Differences and Their Impact on the Success of the Organization

Some of the elements found to have the strongest impact on cross-cultural or multicultural business include the following:³⁶

•   Communicating Explicit versus implicit

•   Evaluating Direct negative feedback versus indirect negative feedback

•   Leading Egalitarian versus hierarchical

•   Deciding Consensual versus top-down

•   Disagreeing Confrontation versus avoidance

•   Persuading Holistic versus specific

•   Scheduling Organized time versus flexible time

•   Trusting Task versus relationship

Setting the Vision That Defines the Strategic Connection Between Diversity and Organizational Success

Organizational leaders are the ones on whose shoulders rest the need to set and communicate the vision for the company. They must set forth the clear desire to embrace diversity and acknowledge that diversity brings its own set of problems. With an eye on the need to resolve those conflicts, leaders can create a culture of diversity acceptance, knowing they will get a fair chance to express their needs and have those needs respected. Leaders, including HR professionals, must communicate that people should not expect to have all of their needs met as they are expressed but, through discussion and negotiation, can meet them in ways acceptable to others in the workforce as well.

Building Cross-Cultural Relationships and Partnerships

Regardless of their background, when cultural representatives interact, they can build strong cross-cultural partnerships if they observe seven tips recommended by Juliette C. Mayers.³⁷

•   Seek to understand. Don’t make assumptions. Ideally you want to learn about different cultures through a variety of credible sources such as your own personal relationships, books, travel, research, and ongoing education.

•   Keep an open mind. Avoid stereotypes. Expand your base by building a broad cross-section of relationships such as gender, race, sexual orientation, country of origin, and people who think differently from you.

•   Start with “who you know.” The best place to start is with others who you know inside and outside of your organization, business, and social organizations.

•   Attend multicultural networking events. Professional organizations, cultural events, conferences, diversity forums, minority business expos, and community events are all great places to network.

•   Get involved. Volunteer and partner with groups and organizations where you can add value, while interacting and getting to know others from different backgrounds. It will take time to build trust and to establish authentic relationships, so think long-term.

•   Keep your word. Establishing trust is the key to sustained successful relationships. If you say you’re going to do something, do it!

•   Assume positive intent. Be positive. At some point miscommunication is likely to occur. When this happens, don’t give up. Assume positive intent and continue your journey. Persistence is the key. Stay the course and establish yourself as someone with genuine interest in maintaining relationships across cultures.

Summary

In this segment, we examined global and cultural needs and their impacts when organizations begin the process of operating in other countries. Differences in the speed of work and the way in which respect is shown and expected all play a part in how we help our groups develop the common culture we want to have moving into the future. Each culture has positive contributions to make, and through discussions, those contributions can be discovered and highlighted.

Business Cluster

The Business cluster represents 18.5 percent of both exams’ weighted scores. There are three competencies that fall within the Business cluster.

•   Behavioral Competency 6—Business Acumen

•   Behavioral Competency 7—Consultation

•   Behavioral Competency 8—Critical Evaluation

This cluster covers the behaviors, attributes, and knowledge for HR professionals to identify, design, implement, and evaluate HR solutions that meet its organization’s goals and objectives. These competencies address HR’s ability to understand the business and environment in which the organization does business, create and implement solutions to meet the human capital needs, suggest and lead change initiatives, and gather/analyze data for informed business decisions.

Behavioral Competency 6—Business Acumen

Understanding how the business (organization) runs, what makes it financially viable, and how it can be guided to greater effectiveness is a role for HR managers that gains importance each day.

Three subcompetencies comprise the Business Acumen competency. They are defined by SHRM³⁸ as follows:

•   Business and competitive awareness Understanding the organization’s operations, functions, products and services, and the competitive, economic, social, and political environments in which the organization operates

•   Business analysis Applying business metrics, principles, and technologies to inform and address business needs

•   Strategic alignment Aligning HR strategy, communications, initiatives, and operations with the organization’s strategic direction

Key Concepts

•   Business terms and concepts (e.g., return on investment [ROI])

•   Analyzing and interpreting business documents (e.g., balance sheets, budgets, cash flow statements, profit and loss statements)

•   Elements of a business case

•   Business intelligence techniques and tools (e.g., online analytical processing, advanced analytics, business intelligence portals)

•   Financial analysis and methods for assessing business health

Definition

According to SHRM, Business Acumen is defined “as the knowledge, skills, abilities, and other characteristics (KSAOs) needed to understand the organization’s operations, functions, and external environment, and to apply business tools and analyses that inform HR initiatives and operations consistent with the overall strategic direction of the organization.”³⁹

Proficiency Indicators for All HR Professionals

These are the basic behaviors required of all HR professionals in the area of Business Acumen.

Building Strategic Relationships

Strategic relationships are symbiotic. They provide each person or entity with something that they need. Strategic relations can exist with vendors, customers, regulators, and other oversight groups. HR can contribute to those relationships through its policies, planning, and management of the HR functions. Everything HR does should support the organization’s strategic planning objectives.

Understanding the Business Operations

Business operations are ongoing activities involved in the production of value for the organization’s stakeholders. HR contributes to an organization’s business operations by supporting its people assets in ways that enhance the organization’s strategic goals and objectives.

Learning the Business and Operational Functions

“Operations management (OM) is the business function responsible for managing the process of creation of goods and services. It involves planning, organizing, coordinating, and controlling all the resources needed to produce a company’s goods and services. Because operations management is a management function, it involves managing people, equipment, technology, information, and all the other resources needed in the production of goods and services. Operations management is the central core function for every company. This is true regardless of the size of the company, the industry it is in, whether it is manufacturing or service, or is for-profit or not-for-profit.”⁴⁰ HR professionals should create “people” policies and practices that contribute to the organization’s operational success.

Understanding the Industry

Industries are collections of enterprises doing similar things or serving similar segments of the economy. Examples include energy, retail, restaurant, communications, consumer products, and business services. Organizations within an industry either compete with one another for a portion of the market or serve those who are competing. HR policies and procedures should be constructed to enable rapid response to industry demands and competitive adjustments.

Making the Business Case for HR Management

HR should contribute key elements to organizational success. This requires the development of a business case. There are specific content requirements for a business case.

The ten elements of an HR business case include the following:⁴¹

•   Problem statement In one paragraph or less, clearly state the specific business problem.

•   Background Be sure to include significant information regarding skills, budgeting, and performance that contribute to the business problem. Indicate, in general terms, what’s required to resolve or reduce the problem.

•   Project objectives Use a maximum of seven bullet points to state what the proposed solution is trying to accomplish. Some examples may include purchasing hardware and software or selecting a new vendor.

•   Current process Identify the organizational processes and units impacted by the proposed solution such as the training department when training is required, as well as other impacted units and relationships with clients, external partners, and the competition.

•   Requirements List resources needed to complete the project, such as staff, hardware, software, print materials, time, and budget.

•   Alternatives Outline at least four options to implementing the proposed solution. Be sure to include basic requirements for each and estimate project risks, ramp-up time, training costs, and project delays.

•   Compare alternatives Compare and contrast each of the alternatives with the proposed solution and the other alternatives. State similarities and differences, benefits, detriments, and costs associated with each option.

•   Additional considerations List critical success factors other than return on investment (ROI) metrics; for example, list the effects on partnership agreements with specific vendors or the potential need for help desk or customer support.

•   Action plan Propose specific action steps. State your short-term (first 3 months) and long-term (3 months to conclusion) action plans, including major milestones. This section should also include proposed metrics to measure success.

•   Executive summary Write a clear, one-page summary of the proposed solution. Tailor it to your audience and offer a high-level overview of research that leads you to make the proposal.

Marketing HR

HR challenges have increased in recent times. Identifying, attracting, and holding onto qualified talent are the number-one priorities in many industries. The trades (carpentry, plumbing, electrical) are in crisis because they don’t have a supply of qualified talent from which to draw. That leads to the need to be innovative in how to “grow your own” or support training programs that will graduate qualified people who can be hired. HR plays a key role in those strategies. Letting people inside the organization know that HR is working on their behalf to accomplish these types of critical functions is important to creating HR credibility within the organization.

Applying Organizational Metrics

Metrics are measurements. Organizational metrics are measurements of individual functions or specific business processes within the organization. Applying metrics involves identifying the things to be measured that are critical indicators of success for the organization. Then, once the measurements have been identified, it is necessary to prepare a plan for implementing or applying them.

Business metrics can include things such as creating policies that attract top talent to fill job openings and identifying applications for social media in raising revenues. HR metrics within those business metrics might include annual benchmarking within the industry for employment policies to be sure your organization remains competitive and HR actions that can support social media programs.

Using Organizational Metrics

HR can employ organizational metrics easily enough. Here are two very basic measurements that impact HR:

•   Revenue per employee Divide the revenue by employee head count.

•   Expense per employee Divide the expense element (or total expense) by employee head count.

These can be applied to the total organization or to individual elements (divisions, departments) within the organization.

Metrics can be tactical or strategic. Tactical metrics are such things as reasons why people accept job offers, levels of satisfaction with the boss (supervisor, manager), and number of new hires made within the target date on each requisition. Strategic metrics are things like goals or targets met within a period of time (month, quarter, year), value received for HR programs compared to forecast value, and achievement rates for revenue or expense targets and goals.

Leveraging Technology

Technology plays an indispensable role in today’s employment world. Yet technology without proper consideration of its impact on the workforce is not helpful. Technology can have a positive effect on human resources. It can play a key role in communicating, interacting, collaborating, and training workers. Making sure technology is working for you and not against you is the process of leveraging technology to its greatest advantage.

Training used to be done in a classroom environment. People would have to travel to the training location, stay in hotels or long-term housing, eat meals out, do laundry, and do other activities that allowed them to remain in the training for the time required. Technology today allows training to be done electronically, so traveling to a central training site is no longer necessary. People can stay at home and participate in training while on the job or away from the workplace. That saves time and money. Measuring the savings is one way to support HR’s contribution to organizational economic performance.

Proficiency Indicators for Senior HR Professionals

Senior HR professionals are expected to be able to do and say these following 19 behaviors over and above the basic behaviors we have already reviewed. If you are studying for the SHRM-SCP exam, pay close attention to these requirements.

Developing ROIs for All HR Initiatives

Return on investment (ROI) is a way of expressing the financial benefit gained from any given business activity. You can talk about ROI of a new paid time off policy when looking at the impact on absence rates and expenses. You can examine ROI for offering employee access to their employment record on the organization’s computer network. It can allow employees to enter their own data changes (marriage name change, birth of a new child for health care enrollment, or updating educational achievements when receiving a new degree). Such programs can reduce the payroll expense in the HR department and thereby offer an opportunity to compare the payroll savings with the expense associated with the technology program permitting employee record access.

Assessing Risks/SWOT

There are two sources of risk for any organization: internal and external. Internal risks come from strengths and weaknesses. External risks come from opportunities and threats. Together, they form the acronym SWOT.

•   Strengths Advantages you and your team have that will help you reach project goals. It’s important to know your special skills that give you an advantage. Lack of strengths in a specific area can define a risk.

•   Weaknesses Anything internal to your organization or team that could prevent you from meeting objectives. Something that gives you a disadvantage relative to others.

•   Opportunities External facts that could lead to a positive outcome in meeting objectives. Overlooking opportunities can be described as representing specific risks.

•   Threats External elements that could jeopardize your project.

Aligning HR Strategy, Goals, and Objectives

According to SHRM, “Identifying and implementing workforce strategies in a challenging global economy is a high-priority issue for top executives. To be successful, HR professionals and business leaders together must grapple with the many variables that affect the organization’s ability to attain its strategic objectives. They must develop quantitative and qualitative approaches to efficiently and effectively attract, engage, and retain human capital.”⁴² Once HR strategy, goals, and objectives are all in alignment, the outcomes are more likely to be positive. Creating action plans to implement strategies and then achieving specific goals and objectives become easier once they are identified and written. Even more important for other managers in the organization is the ability this will provide for showing how HR can support them in their efforts toward their goals and objectives.

Demonstrating Business Language Fluency

It has become clear that for HR professionals to be accepted as strategic business partners with other executives in the organization, they need to be able to talk about what they do using business terminology. So, expressing the budget impact for a new employee benefit program and then showing the offset that can be accomplished by reducing turnover costs will speed acceptance and credibility for HR. Business language includes profits, loss, cost impact ratios, industry position impact for given programs, and revenue impact ratios for HR programs that can be sold outside the organization.

Examining Organizational Problems

Problem identification is a critical step in the process of finding solutions. Too often, people rush to express their thoughts about solutions without first identifying the problem they face. Problem identification is a process of questioning what is getting in the way of achieving specific goals and objectives. For example, what is preventing us from getting more employee enrollment in the company retirement savings program? Why is the turnover rate in the accounting department above normal? How can we reduce the cost of training managers in the new safety requirements? Once the problem is identified, you can begin working on solutions but not before.

Sometimes, people rush to recommend solutions without a problem having surfaced. That situation presents a solution in search of a problem. If you are to be part of the executive team in your organization, you should get into the habit of clearly laying out the problem before rushing to identify solutions.

Developing Solutions

Problem-solving techniques are many and varied. They all basically have these steps in common:

1.   Define the problem. What is it that gets in the way of our reaching our goals?

2.   Identify options. What might we do to eliminate the problem? These are the solutions we think might work.

3.   Evaluate the options. Develop a list of criteria any solution must meet to be acceptable and then compare each of the options identified against that list of criteria. Any option that doesn’t pass this test must be discarded. What remains is a list of those options that can work.

4.   Choose an option and implement it. Make a judgment about what might be best of all the options that pass the criteria screening. Identify what is necessary for the successful implementation in the form of an action plan.

5.   Evaluate the solution. Ask if the chosen solution actually solved the problem. Did it create other problems? What other follow-up action might be required?

Evaluating Proposed Business Cases

Business case analysis (BCA) looks at programs, solutions to problems, or other action plans with the eye on how they will impact the business. In every analysis, consideration must be given to the impact the activity or plan will have on the overall business operation. What is the impact on profit or loss? What is the impact on corporate image in the marketplace? What is the impact on product liability? What is the impact on employee retention? Not all of these will be the focus of any one evaluation. But all are eventually going to be part of some business case analysis at some time.

Ultimately, business case analysis is a means of projecting accountability for taking any action. Business case analysis demands accountability. Any senior HR professional these days must be willing to be accountable for the success or failure of their programs. Putting their job on the line is something HR professionals are expected to do every day. It is no longer acceptable to duck accountability by excusing results as unmeasurable people issues. If it can’t be measured, it shouldn’t be done.

Benchmarking the Competition

According to Ross Beard, “Competitive benchmarking can be defined as the continuous process of comparing a firm’s practices and performance measures with that of its most successful competitors.”⁴³ For HR professionals, that may mean identifying compensation levels through periodic compensation surveys. It could involve comparative analysis of insurance benefits being offered in other organizations within the industry compared to those offered in our organization. What “leading-edge” programs are being offered by competing companies? Might they work here? What would be the business impact of adapting such programs?

Communicating Global Labor Market Direction

Communicating global labor market direction first requires identifying what that direction might be. Is there a trend for exporting manufacturing jobs to Asian countries? Is there a trend to return manufacturing jobs to the United States? What trends are politically motivated, and what are economically motivated?

Once identified, the trends can be articulated and communicated to executives within the organization. Perhaps there is an impact on technology workers because it is suddenly no longer economically viable to produce computer components off-shore. Maintaining a competitive edge in the marketplace requires following those economic benefits and moving production units to locations where the work can be done for less money. The executive team needs input from HR professionals that will allow them to make these types of decisions.

Maintaining Expert Knowledge

HR is responsible for identifying sources of expert knowledge that can be used when job openings occur in any department of the organization. It is also critical that HR protect its own expert knowledge. That is often done through specifying a certification requirement when searching for HR professionals. When expert knowledge leaves through normal turnover, the organization’s goals and objectives can be negatively impacted if there is no backup available. Fast replacement is often needed. That means HR must have done its homework and already identified sources for candidates with that knowledge.

Developing HR Business Strategies

In the beginning, there are corporate strategies. These are normally developed by executives representing each of the major organizational work units such as legal, production, research, engineering, accounting, and, of course, HR management. Once organizational strategies are clearly defined and documented, each individual work unit can begin developing their specific strategic plans to support the larger organization.

Administrative support entities are unique in that they serve all operational units in the organization. What they do impacts the internal client groups. So, strategic planning for support groups must be focused on the services they offer to internal clients. That means fancy HR initiatives and the latest fashionable HR programs should take a back seat to delivering the HR support needed by the client groups. Once clients are satisfied, HR professionals can spend time thinking about upgrading to the latest versions of HR management programs.

For each strategy there should be at least one action item in the action plan. Implementing a strategy is necessary to reflect its reason for existing. If you don’t plan to take action on the strategy, scratch that strategy off your list because it is going to use energy for monitoring and maintenance without delivering any practical value to your group.

Maintaining Knowledge of Economic Factors

Human resource management is a function that embraces pieces of each organizational unit, carrying some influence over the success or failure of those portions of the internal client functions. If staffing is not done in a timely way by HR management, the production and accounting organizations cannot perform their tasks successfully.

HR’s influence is dependent upon knowledge of economic factors. The annual company budget is dependent upon knowing the cost of compensation in all departments. HR holds the key to those numbers and any adjustments that will be required and appropriate in the coming year. The cost of employee benefit plans is also something that HR oversees but shares with client organizations inside the company. If HR professionals don’t understand the economic impact of these expenses, the support they provide to other groups cannot be sound or effective. It would be like the legal staff providing bad legal advice to other departments.

HR is often responsible for a large portion of the employer’s compliance efforts, from safety to equal employment opportunity. Done improperly, the economic impact to the business can be quite severe, including fines and legal judgments.

Evaluating Critical Activities

Each effort we make in our jobs should be subject to review and evaluation. Review involves checking to be sure we have included the topic in our action planning. Evaluation is the effort to determine the value achieved by the action taken.

Knowing the Business

It is up to HR to understand the business it supports. Are there seasonal workflow fluctuations? Are there peaks and valleys for employment activity? How important are specific educational backgrounds for future employees? What colleges will provide the skills that new hires will require? How much do employee benefit programs contribute to employee retention programs?

How do labor relations efforts work in this employer organization? What type of employee benefits are needed to attract and retain the type of qualified people you need?

Brainstorm the specific questions you must ask so that you understand the business you are supporting. Revisit these questions and others at least annually. Invite critical updates from internal client executives at any time during the year.

Setting Technology Strategy

The information technology (IT) department is responsible for corporate technology initiatives. But HR professionals are responsible for IT developments within their own realm of influence. What programs will permit employees to access and update their own employee records in the human resource information system (HRIS)? What types of programs will give employees the opportunity to do online comparisons of various benefit programs they may want to consider? How can new policies be introduced online so training costs can be controlled?

Overall, HR professionals are given the responsibility of identifying the strategy they will apply for IT within the HR department. Knowing how that will impact and contribute to company strategies is something the HR professional must undertake.

Serving as a Strategic Contributor

For years HR professionals have been clamoring for “a seat at the table,” meaning they want to “play with the big boys and girls” in the corporate suite. That is not something that is given to HR. It is something HR must earn. Proving that HR belongs at the executive table can be done only through demonstration of strategic contributions to the corporation. HR professionals have been welcomed into the “C-suite” (corporate executive suite) discussions when they have been able to show they add value to the discussions and programs.

Influencing Government Policy

Compliance with government regulations is often delegated to the HR department. Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) rules about safety require compliance efforts for all employers, regardless of size. Department of Labor (DOL) regulations about wages and hours of work, federal contracting, and the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) all require compliance efforts.

Employers can influence government policy by monitoring the Federal Register postings of proposals for regulatory changes. Identifying how those proposals will impact their employer is a service HR professionals can provide. Submitting those studies with editorial comments to the agency proposing the changes will help by giving “real-world impact” input to the government. Testifying at government hearings at local, state, and federal levels is another way to offer input to government changes governing employee management issues.

Developing Business Strategy with Top Leaders

HR professionals have a great deal to offer their organization’s strategic planning process. Participating with the top leaders of the organization in that effort will cement HR’s relationship with the executive team. Offering to take on responsibility for key strategic plans will assure the executive team invites HR back to participate in the future.

Defining Strategy for Managing Talent

We know now that any HR strategy must compliment overall employer strategy. Managing talent is a strategic contribution to the organization’s interest in maintaining a workforce needed to produce products and services for financial success.

Talent management requires recruiting, onboarding, training, probationary observation periods, and assessment of match for talent to needs. HR can likely develop a strategy for each of these components of workforce oversight.

Summary

In this section, we identified the need for HR professionals to gain and exercise the knowledge and skills associated with business acumen. Assessing financial impacts of business proposals related to employee management is an important HR contribution to executive discussions and proposal considerations. All HR programs should be assessed periodically using business management tools, including profit and loss sheets and balance sheets. HR professionals cannot have credibility with other executives unless they have this ability to analyze programs using business considerations, business and competitive awareness, and an alignment of strategies in HR with corporate strategies.

Behavioral Competency 7—Consultation

Providing advice and counsel to your clients is one of the biggest roles and most important for HR professionals. There are some important components of that effort you should be developing or polishing.

Five subcompetencies comprise the Consultation competency. They are defined by SHRM⁴⁵ as follows:

•   Evaluating business challenges Working with business partners and leaders to identify business challenges and opportunities for HR solutions

•   Designing HR solutions Working with business partners and leaders to design HR solutions and initiatives that meet the business needs

•   Implementing and supporting HR solutions Working with business partners and leaders to implement and support HR solutions and initiatives

•   Managing change Leading and supporting maintenance of or changes in strategy, organization, and/or operations

•   Interacting with customers Providing high-quality customer service and contributing to a strong customer service culture

Key Concepts

•   Organizational change management theories, models (e.g., Lewin’s change management model, McKinsey 7-6 model, Kotter’s eight-step change model), and processes (e.g., leadership buy-in, building a case for change, engaging employees, communicating change, removing barriers)

•   Consulting processes and models (e.g., discovery, analysis and solution, recommendation, implementation), including the contributions of consulting to organizational systems and processes

•   Effective consulting techniques (e.g., understanding organizational culture, understanding areas and limits of one’s own expertise, setting reasonable expectations, avoiding overpromising)

•   Key components of successful client interactions (e.g., listening, empathy, communication, follow-up)

•   Methods for design and delivery of HR service functions and processes (e.g., issue tracking, client service)

Definition

According to SHRM, Consultation is defined “as the knowledge, skills, abilities, and other characteristics (KSAOs) needed to work with organizational stakeholders in evaluating business challenges and identifying opportunities for the design, implementation, and evaluation of change initiatives and to build ongoing support for HR solutions that meet the changing needs of customers and the business.”⁴⁶

Proficiency Indicators for All HR Professionals

Every HR professional should have the ability to behave in ways that will offer their organization these competencies.

Applying Creative Problem-Solving

Of course, there are “old” problems that keep cycling back demanding attention. Those include open insurance benefit enrollment each year. Yet there are even more “new” problems that arise requiring more than compliance. Those problems demand unique approaches that can keep our organizations running smoothly with attention to new requirements. Perhaps the conversion of HR’s role to include oversight of electronic employee records is the best example. Each organization has its own needs and cultural expectations demand that the HRIS respond to those needs.

Creative problem-solving for such a company-wide effort should involve representatives from all aspects of company life. Together, identifying the problem (“How do we convert paper record systems into an HRIS?”) and exploring possible solutions can result in a superior approach that wouldn’t have been possible absent a bit of creativity.

Remember the basics of creative problem-solving and assume the role of facilitator so you can guide your colleagues to a proper conclusion.

Serving as an In-House Expert

No one in the organization knows as much about employee programs as the professionals in the HR department. Being an in-house expert is just part of what HR people do. Remember that being accurate is one of the job demands. Loss of credibility can happen in a heartbeat. So, be sure you are correct before answering questions. Do your homework. Study each of the subject areas you are assigned. They can include wage and hour rules, union contract provisions, discrimination prevention requirements, management skills training, employee relocation services, HRIS administration, and so many more. Become the expert people will look to for answers when they have questions. Again, you should know all applicable U.S. employment laws (found in Chapter 3) and your local laws that apply to where you have employment.

Analyzing Specific Business Challenges

Have you ever had one of your external customers tell the sales and marketing organization that you must attest that your organization is compliant with equal employment opportunity and affirmative action requirements? It is not unusual for customer organizations, particularly local governmental entities, to say they require adherence to stricter requirements than those imposed by the federal government. There are many reasons for such a difference, many of which are not founded in law. They may require release of sensitive employee data to “prove” your organization is doing what the customer’s requirements demand. In these situations, along with your sales and marketing people, you have the opportunity to determine whether you are willing to release the data required or push back with objections and negotiate. When the customer is adamant about its submission demands, you are faced with the question about whether you will comply or forego business with that customer. All along the way, you must identify issues, provide assessment of those issues to others in the decision-making group, and offer recommendations with your rationale. The final decision is not going to be made by HR for many of these types of issues. Yet the final decision depends on high-quality staff work by HR professionals.

Generating Organizational Interventions

What happens when the production department and the maintenance department have a conflict over access to machinery? Production wants to use the machinery for production. Maintenance wants to use the machinery for updates and repair. Both cannot prevail without some compromise. HR can help identify how union and wage and hour rules can be used to support a solution to the problem. Scheduling maintenance work during a shift that is not used for production is one approach. HR can facilitate the resolution by knowing legal requirements and offering support to both departments and their own missions. In the end, the only thing that matters is having the company reach its objectives.

Developing Consultative and Coaching Skills

Everyone needs personal help from time to time, even managers and executives. One of the most satisfying and productive HR roles is that of counselor and coach.

Ten Tips for Building Relationships with Your Clients During Meetings⁴⁷

•   Do your homework. Be sure you know the mission and goals of the organizational unit you will be working with.

•   Listen before you talk. Ask questions to be sure you understand the client’s needs. Tell them you will be taking notes as the meeting progresses. That is so you don’t forget a follow-up item and also so you capture key points along the way.

•   Learn about your client’s vision of the future. Where will their portion of the organization be in another few years? Will their role be changing within the company?

•   Provide anecdotes and examples. Help your clients understand the nuances of HR requirements and options. Always try to relate your message specifically to your clients through conversation and with a storytelling approach. Describe similar situations and offer examples of how others handled situations successfully.

•   Offer to work with other advisors. Perhaps the legal staff or accounting should be involved in the discussion. Be willing to work with others so your advice can satisfy the client’s needs.

•   Save your clients time and effort. Your client is busy like you are. If you can help them save their time and budget dollars, you will be doing them a favor.

•   Use technology. Suggest web portals or apps that can help the client with their problem(s).

•   Build a team approach. Whenever possible, make use of your HR colleagues as backup to your personal participation in the discussions. If you are a sole HR practitioner, this will be more difficult, but it may be possible for your boss to help out.

•   Find out how clients prefer to be contacted. Not everyone prefers e-mail contact. Some would rather have text messages or even a voice phone call. If the client doesn’t have a preference and you do, ask if you can contact them the way you find best for you.

•   Follow up. After the meeting, follow up with your client to thank them for their time and suggest you are available for additional discussions if they would like to have more sessions.

There are some steps you can take to practice your coaching skills in addition to those you use for consultation.

Coaching Skills⁴⁸

•   Listen with curiosity. Convey a genuine interest in what others have to say.

•   Take in what you hear. Concentrate on what the other person is saying. Don’t be thinking about what your next comment will be.

•   Reflect with accuracy. Active listening is a skill that HR professionals must develop. Comments like “So, what you’re saying is…” and “What I’m hearing is…” are good ways to recap what you think you heard. If it is incorrect, the other person can make the necessary correction by saying, “No. What I really meant was….”

•   Ask open-ended questions to explore more fully. Who, what, when, where, and how are the way to begin questions that can’t be answered with a simple “yes” or “no.” They require an explanation and allow the coach to get additional information that will be helpful in providing the advice necessary.

•   Provide feedback for development. Understand the individual’s strengths and weaknesses and know that feedback is what we all need to be sure we are on track with the journey to our goals. Feedback is not an accusation or complaint. Feedback consists of suggestion and rationale, reinforcement, and praise.

Guiding Employees

Every day, employees will walk into the HR department with questions. Today it will be about life insurance. Tomorrow it will be about a discrimination complaint. Later in the week it will be someone asking how to correct some of the information in their employee records. Guiding employees to a solution that they can implement themselves is going to free you to help others more quickly than if you took on the problem resolution yourself.

Employees are sometimes confused. They don’t often know the law and its application. And sometimes they don’t even know company policy. Guiding them through understanding where to find the answers they need is a good approach. You may have an employee who wants to file a discrimination complaint because their boss has just told them their work performance must be improved or there will be further steps toward a performance improvement program. Everything is called discrimination when it actually may not be discrimination. Employees don’t know that. You can help them understand the legal requirements for something to actually be called illegal discrimination.

Sexual harassment problems are usually just the opposite. People say, “I need to tell you something, but I don’t want you to do anything.” You have to guide them to understand that once you are aware of the problem, you are obligated to do something about it. You can’t keep things to yourself.

Proficiency Indicators for Senior HR Professionals

Senior HR professionals have much more impact on the business because they are involved in developing strategies that will contribute to the company achieving its goals.

Creating Talent Management Strategies

Managing talent depends on knowing two things. What talent exists in the incumbent workforce, and what talent needs exist in the organization now and into the future?

A strategy is a plan for how you will reach your goal. If the goal is to determine what talent needs exist that can’t be met by your incumbent workforce, then the strategy can reflect how you will obtain that talent from external sources. Finding new recruiting sources for minorities, women, disabled, and veterans can be helpful. Utilizing the resources of specific groups such as the Institute for Electrical and Electronic Engineers (IEEE), technical school graduates, or the United States Chef Association can tap into specific talent and skills that you may require. Identify the needs you have and then explore how those needs might be met with a campaign aimed at specific groups.

Listening

Listening is an often-underrated skill. Most people don’t do it very well. Senior HR professionals must develop this skill so it can be used to help internal clients and even vendors and recruiting sources from outside.

You will recall our discussion earlier about the communication cycle. It requires a message to be sent from the speaker to the listener. Then, it requires feedback from the listener to the speaker to be sure the message was received and understood in its entirety. The communication cycle embodies the concept of active listening. It requires listening for the meaning of the message, not just the words being used. Feedback to the speaker will allow the speaker to confirm the listener’s understanding or give the speaker an opportunity to correct the misunderstanding.

Feedback amounts to comments like “What I hear you saying is…” or “You’re telling me….” It is often helpful as the speaker to request feedback from the listener. This is helpful for supervisors and managers who are giving instructions to workers. After the instruction, say something like, “Now, tell me what you are going to do,” Or “so I know I have clearly conveyed what I intended, please tell me what you understood and what action you will be taking.”

Developing Human Capital Visions

A vision is a statement of what you want for the future. Steve Jobs had a vision that Apple’s desktop computer would be the best on the market. He also had a vision that Pixar could become a leader in animated entertainment. He articulated those visions and developed strategic plans to support them. And, guess what? They came to pass.

It is always amazing to hear people talk about “overnight successes.” The fact is, not very many successes actually develop overnight. They take years and suddenly appear to have just happened because they broke through the background clutter and are now visible as a force in the world.

Human capital changes, faster in some industries than in others. Yet it changes. When USS-POSCO, the joint venture of U.S. Steel and POSCO steel in Korea, decided to work together, there were some basic requirements they had to meet for the success they wanted. They completely refurbished the factory that U.S. Steel had in Pittsburg, California. It was changed from a steel smelting operation to a plant that would “cold-roll” steel for customer use. Cold-rolled steel is used to make refrigerators, computer housings, automobile parts, and “tin” cans for the food industry. The smelting and hot rolling was to be done in Korea; then the rolls of steel would be shipped to Pittsburg, California, where they would be rolled again but without heating. Some of the stock would be zinc coated to produce galvanized steel. The thing is, none of this can be done by people manually operating the machinery that squeezes the steel smaller and smaller in thickness by thousands of an inch at a time. It is all controlled by computer. That meant employees had to undergo 6 months of training in statistical process control, machinery, and hydraulic operations. The talent requirements for the new factory shifted from laborer and craftspeople to technicians. They had to find their new employees somewhere other than they had been looking historically.

Your vision of human capital in the future of your organization will demand a new strategic plan for attaining the goals associated with that vision.

Maximizing ROI for the Organization

HR Professionals magazine identifies several elements of the effort to maximize return on investment for an organization.⁴⁹

•   Perceptual elements How we learn and retain new knowledge (auditory, visual, tactile and/or kinesthetic, and verbal)

•   Psychological elements How we process new information and for making decisions/solving problems (analytic/global, reflective/impulsive)

•   Environmental elements How the work environment contributes to or detracts from productivity (sound or quiet, bright or low light, warm or cool temperature, informal or formal seating)

•   Physiological elements How we remain energized and stay alert at work (time of day, intake, and mobility)

•   Emotional elements How quickly we complete challenging and complex tasks (internal or external motivation, single- or multiple-task persistence, more or less conformity, and more or less structure)

•   Sociological elements How we prefer to work and interact effectively with others (alone/pair/ small or large group, more or less authority, more or less variety)

Making sure the organization receives the greatest financial return on its investment in HR is the duty of every senior HR professional.

Using Appropriate Analytical Tools

Data analysis is a growing responsibility of the HR professional. Particularly at the senior HR levels, determining and interpreting the data are critical functions. The question is, how do we perform those analyses?

Some of the software available for use in data analyses include Orange Data Mining, R Software Environment, Weka Data Mining, Tableau Public, Arcadia Data, Microsoft R, ITALASSI, Shogun, Trifacta, ELKI, Scikit-learn, Data Applied, Lavastorm Analytics Engine, Gephi, DataMelt, TANAGRA, Julia, RapidMiner Starter Edition, SciPy, KNIME Analytics Platform Community, and Dataiku DSS Community. Most of these are languages that will require programming assistance.

“As enterprises have more and more data at their fingertips, the expectation is now that your average business user can have access to key metrics in real-time—without having to know what SQL means.”⁵⁰

This has led to a boom in companies dedicated to building data visualization and analysis tools that can be used by almost anyone within the business. Gone are the days of waiting for an analyst to generate a report that is out of date the minute you get it or spending weeks mired in Excel.” The explosion of databases and uncounted web sites gathering information about visitors has led to a boom in the software being offered to do the analysis job. “This boom is reflected in the figures … that the global business intelligence (BI) and analytics software market could grow further to $22.8 billion by 2020.”

Identifying Creative Solutions

Senior HR professionals are the key players in their organizations who can explore alternative solutions for difficult, often new problems. Sure, the old problems about helping employees understand the benefit plan choices will still be around. But now there are issues such as protecting the HRIS data from external hackers. Dealing with industrial espionage, key employees walking away for jobs at competitor companies, and key vendors closing up shop are just three of the types of problems you can face in today’s world.

How you deal with these problems will determine whether you are going to survive as an HR department without turnover in key HR personnel. Creative approaches are the ones that explore options. Executives want to know what is possible, not what is impossible. It is up to senior HR executives to help them find those alternatives.

Supervising HR Investigations

One element of HR management that should be consistent is the investigation of employee complaints. There are some legal experts who believe that the employer’s legal staff should conduct all the investigations. Other people within the legal community counsel that HR should be the investigating group so there is a separation of investigator and legal counsel.

However you approach the issue in your organization, you will want to be sure that every complaint investigation is handled in the same rigorous and systematic way. Methodology is important. Touchstones during the investigation are important. Discrimination complaints must meet certain requirements. If an employee says she has been discriminated against because of her sex, it is necessary to determine what happened that has resulted in her paying a penalty of some kind. And what was that penalty? If those basic elements are present, the prima facie case has been established. Then the investigation must gather evidence to show that the complaint can be substantiated.

Should our organization treat each complaint on its emotional value rather than its evidentiary value, our liability will likely be increased. Ultimately, the complaint will migrate to state or federal enforcement agencies and sometimes to the courts. Senior HR managers must supervise those conducting the investigations to remedy problems when that is appropriate and to explain that the employee does not have the evidence to support her claim if that is the appropriate outcome.

Recognizing HR Liabilities

According to SHRM,⁵¹ these are the top ten employment liabilities in the modern workplace. Some of these may be covered by insurance, and others will not be subject to insurance protections. Some coverage will depend on specific policies designed to cover risks of discriminatory treatment among other issues.

•   Wage and hour claims Violations of FLSA and state counterparts can cause employer exposure to financial remedies.

•   Class action lawsuits More frequently these days employees are banding together to consolidate their complaints into a class action lawsuit. It means the exposure for employers is higher as a result.

•   FMLA violations Not following the Family and Medical Leave Act can bring financial remedies that could be quite costly.

•   Whistleblowers These are employees who file complaints that something illegal is happening at the employer’s organization.

•   Data breaches This is loss of employee data that could lead to identity theft.

•   Social media Beware of negative reviews of company policies or employment practices.

•   Alternative work arrangements Telecommuting, job sharing, and other alternative work schedules can lead to FMLA complaints and more.

•   Discrimination complaints Violations of civil rights laws brings exposure for financial remedies.

•   Sexual harassment Also a violation of civil rights law, workplace behavior that is sexual in nature can bring employer liability.

•   Gender and sexual orientation claims Most recently defined of the civil rights protections, this type of complaint and financial remedy is just gaining traction.

Coaching Executives

More than any other, this skill will allow HR managers to leverage influence in the employer organization. Teaching line executives how to evaluate problems that have HR implications is a way to help them deal with issues within their own organizational unit. And there is the personal element of coaching. Executives sometimes need help to adjust their personal approach to managing employees. Sometimes they don’t see what their behavior is doing adversely to the workforce. Helping them understand that impact and exploring alternative approaches can give the executive a path to greater effectiveness.

Designing Strategic HR and Business Solutions

Strategy is the plan that you will implement to achieve your goals. HR strategy should always support business solutions. HR must help the organization meet its goals. Proving that link is the duty of a senior HR professional. When problems arise that were not anticipated, HR professionals should be key players in developing the appropriate solutions so company goals will be supported.

Summary

Behavior competency 7, Consultation, has explored the things that HR professionals say and do that will provide quality support to other departments. Collaborative interactions can be rewarding and satisfying when the impact is measured and found to contribute to company goals.

Behavioral Competency 8—Critical Evaluation

The days of “winging it” are in the past. HR professionals are now able to access vast amounts of data to help them in their decision-making. This area of behavioral competency looks at the extent to which that information is gathered, assessed, and used in the decision-making process.

Four subcompetencies comprise the Critical Evaluation competency. They are defined by SHRM⁵² as the following:

•   Data advocate Understanding and promoting the important and utility of data

•   Data gathering Understanding how to determine data utility and identifying and gathering data to assist and inform with organizational decisions

•   Data analysis Analyzing data to evaluate HR initiatives and business challenges

•   Evidence-based decision-making Using the results of data analysis to inform and decide the best course of action

Key Concepts

•   Survey and assessment tools (e.g., development, administration, validation of surveys and assessments)

•   Sources of data (e.g., surveys, interviews, focus groups)

•   Basic concepts in statistics (e.g., descriptive statistics, correlation) and measurement (e.g., reliability, validity)

•   Interpretation of data and charts

•   Using data to support a business case (e.g., interpretation, visualization, graphical representation)

Definition

According to SHRM, Global and Cultural Effectiveness is defined “as the knowledge, skills, abilities, and other characteristics (KSAOs) needed to collect and analyze qualitative and quantitative data and to interpret and promote findings that evaluate HR initiatives and inform business decisions and recommendations.”⁵³

Proficiency Indicators for All HR Professionals

Anyone working at the professional level in human resource management is expected to be able to access and interpret information the organization’s leaders need to make accurate decisions about the workforce. What follows are the basics in this area of competency.

Making Sound Decisions

It is a rare circumstance for all information needed to be provided in decision-making. In most situations there is only partial data available. Yet, in spite of that, HR professionals are expected to be able to make good, workable decisions in a timely way. For example, from a long list of possible health insurance vendor programs, HR must select only a handful to present as options for employee enrollment. That requires using whatever might be known about the vendor programs, costs of each program, availability in the geography required, and employee likelihood that each program would be deemed attractive. Only some of that information is available, but the selection of a “short list” must happen anyway. If the decisions are not good, employees will reject some or all of the options. There can be impact on morale and even production levels. Turnover may be impacted whether the decisions made by HR are good or bad. And that is just one example of the importance of sound decisions in the presence of uncertainty.

Assessing the Impact of Laws

Federal and state laws change every year to some degree. When those laws impact HR issues, it is important to determine what specific impact they will have on our organization. When minimum wages increase, there is direct financial impact that can be computed and presented for consideration in the budget planning process. When new benefits are mandated, such as paid sick leave, the costs can be estimated and provided for budget consideration. If there are new requirements placed on nondiscrimination, it may be necessary to train all managers and supervisors in those new legal provisions. If the company decides to move into federal contracting or subcontracting, the financial and recruiting impacts must be estimated.

Chapter 3 lists the federal laws involved based on the payroll head count of any employer organization that is involved in interstate commerce. When a company hires its first employee, it becomes subject to 53 federal laws governing employment. Hire more than 14 people, and the exposure to legal requirements continues to grow.

HR professionals are expected to monitor these legal developments and forecast how the organization will comply with those requirements.

Transferring Knowledge

What do benefit enrollment, payroll, and discrimination complaints have in common? The answer is they all can involve historical data for proper handling. Using knowledge gained in handling one issue within the HR arena to apply to another (or even several other) issue is both efficient and smart. Equally important is the need to pass along to others the information gained in handling problems in one issue so that it might help in other areas.

Applying Critical Thinking to Information Received from Organizational Stakeholders

Determining what information can be used to support organizational success is dependent on being able to identify what is important from what is not. There are many pieces of information that flow into our realm every day. Most of those data don’t have value in the HR decision-making process. So, you have to sort the valuable from the less valuable.

Of the several phone calls received on a given day,

•   One is an alert that the union will be challenging an employee suspension.

•   One is an invitation to speak at the local service club luncheon.

•   One is a subordinate in the HR department complaining about the lack of hand towels in the restroom.

•   One is the boss explaining that the budget estimates are due a week earlier than planned.

•   One is describing the progress to date in planning the office holiday party.

•   One is from the union president wanting to discuss disciplinary policy.

As each call comes in, your priorities may have to shift. And the information you get from one issue may be helpful in some way when addressing other issues. You have to store, sort, and retrieve each of these pieces of data, applying critical thinking to each in determining what will be helpful and what will not be helpful.

Gathering Critical Information

When a problem has been identified such as “The board of directors has just approved a policy that will give paid sick leave to all employees,” it falls to human resources to figure out how to implement that policy. Implementation begins with gathering data. How many employees are going to be impacted? What has been the average absence rate in the past year? What portion of that absence has been due to illness of the employee? What portion has been due to illness of an employee’s family member? Will the new policy apply to family members as well as the employee?

Identify the information you want to have and then go get it. If it is not available for some reason, you may need to make some educated guesses about what it might have been if it were available.

Analyzing Data

Once you have the data you think you need, begin the sorting process to determine what will be helpful and what will not be helpful. Then test the data for accuracy. Do the best you can to determine whether there have been any data collection errors introduced to the process. Were there typos or transpositions? When the data is clean, then begin analyzing what it tells you.

Analyzing Best Practices

Having in hand an analysis of the data for your organization, the next step is to define what the best practices are for the issue being considered. What are other similar employers doing about the same issue? Who can you call (e-mail or text) that will be able to give you information about other employers handling of this issue? Once you have determined what other employers are doing, you will know what they consider best practice in the situation.

Delineating Best Practices

Compare the best practices identified by contacting other employers and researching industry data or through some other source. Determine what similarities exist in how other employers handle a situation. Then compare the way other employers handle a situation and what you would like to do in your organization. Information sources can include the following:

•   Your organizational history

•   Industry data

•   Specific data from one other company

•   Peer-reviewed research

•   Internet information available to the general public

•   Response to survey requests sent to other employers

Combine all the input you can gather and construct a description of the best practices being followed by employers similar to you own.

Identifying Leading Indicators

Leading indicators provide evidence that HR is achieving its goal expectations. Human resource management has common measurement areas. Productivity, employee engagement, recruiting, retention, and budget are some of the key areas.

•   Productivity Translated into dollars, employee productivity offers opportunity for significant savings in company expense. When one employee can produce more this year than last year, the budget will benefit.

•   Engagement Results from employee surveys can indicate the state of morale and positive feelings about the employer. In turn, these factors can reduce turnover, improve attendance, and improve employee loyalty.

•   Recruiting Perception of an employer’s reputation can impact people’s willingness to respond to recruiting efforts.

•   Retention Employee turnover can represent a sizable amount of expense. Reducing that turnover, or increasing retention, can directly reduce costs.

•   Budget Some executives see HR as an overhead expense. Achieving success in expense management is represented by the closeness HR can come to hitting budget targets.

Analyzing Large Quantities of Information

There are vast amounts of data that flow to the HR department each year. There are financial data, recruiting data, internal employee data, and training needs data, just to name a few. It is necessary for HR professionals to sort the important information from the less important. Data can drag the HR organization to a halt. Without prioritization and sorting, data as a total can be so overwhelming that it isn’t possible to deal with all of it. HR professionals must be able to determine which information should be acknowledged and which ignored.

One technique for dealing with large quantities of information is to only dip into that data in search of specific answers to specific questions. Systems can be developed to house data, permit retrieval by authorized individuals, and allow access to answers as questions arise. Protecting the data with security procedures can meet legal and philosophical obligations for privacy. But first, systems can permit data management that will prevent submerging the HR organization.

Once sorted and stored, HR has responsibility to analyze what the data says. What portions of the organization are experiencing the highest turnover rates? What departments have the lowest absence rates? What is the cost of each benefit program? What should be offered in the next round of union negotiations and why? Who has yet to be trained in sexual harassment prevention? Identifying the problem, defining it properly, and then seeking data to help analyze the potential solutions are the key roles in HR departments.

Proficiency Indicators for Senior HR Professionals

Evaluation done at the senior level of HR tends to focus more on the impact of policy and strategy. That evaluation can contribute to discussions held by executives about the positioning of the organization in its market, employee issues, and financial performance.

Maintaining Expert Knowledge

HR knowledge is constantly changing. There are new scientific studies being conducted each year and new laws enacted by federal, state, and local entities. It falls to the senior HR professional to know all of these things, keeping that knowledge current. It is often helpful to seek regular input from the legal staff and the accounting staff, for example. Knowing requirements and how they relate to organizational goals can help by identifying areas in which adjustments should be made.

Senior HR professionals must not only keep current in their knowledge but also be able to understand what that knowledge will mean to organizational objectives and how it will impact performance.

Interpreting Data and Make Recommendations

It is rather easy to identify the cost of benefit plans and suggest changes if costs warrant them. It may be a bit more difficult to interpret data about employee satisfaction and formulate recommendations for changes in policies or practices that might be appropriate.

The key question to ask is, “What impact will this data have on our organization?” Answering that question will then suggest what should be done to influence different outcomes. For example, monitoring recruiting efforts for veterans might tell you the goal for identifying sources of qualified people is not producing the results you hoped it would. The impact on your organization is that you will fall short of the target you set for hiring veterans. If you are a federal contractor, that can mean you would need to make adjustments in the use of recruiting sources. It could be necessary to find new sources of qualified veterans.

Making Decisions with Confidence

Decision-making has two components. One is the willingness to make decisions. The other is the quality of the decisions (or, do the decisions actually work)? Senior HR professionals are expected to be able to make decisions, often in the face of uncertainty. Not all the data will be available to guide you when you would like to have it. Sometimes, the quality of data you do have will be questionable. In the face of all the uncertainty, you are still expected to draw conclusions and make choices that will guide senior executives in your organization.

When policy changes are not an absolute requirement but an option, how will you formulate recommendations? Consider, for example, adding protections in your EEO and affirmative action policy that apply to LGBT. Aside from federal contractors, most other employers have the choice about including LGBT in their policy statement. The question is, should you? What will be the outcome if you do include that group among protected categories of people? What recommendation will you make to the senior executives? Likely you will not have all the data you would like to have about the impact of such a policy change. Yet you are still expected to make a professional determination about the question.

Setting the Direction of HR

Where is your HR organization going? What are its objectives? How should those objectives be redefined from year to year? To determine the answers, it is necessary to evaluate risks and economic and environmental factors.

Keeping a list of issues that will have an impact on your employer organization can help determine any adjustments in goals needed during the year. Economic impacts can come from change in benefit plan costs, increases in payroll expense, and increases or decreases in turnover rates. Environmental factors can include legislation, competition, compensation, and employee relations. Legislation impacts HR by imposing requirements such as records retention and compliance requirements, such as the Americans with Disabilities Act. Competition impacts can come from the effort to recruit the same type of talent found in competing organizations. Employee relations brings policy issues, early retirement programs, and different international expectations among the employee workforce. Compensation factors include the effort to maintain competitive positioning in the job market compared to other similar employer organizations.

How HR responds to each of these factors will determine how well it can meet its stated objectives. Altering the direction HR will take can result in the need to change its objectives.

Seeking Information

Obtaining information can be done strategically and systematically. Senior HR professionals are interested in gathering data that can help them run their HR organization, as well as data that can be shared with other executives.

Strategic data might include the results of employee attitude surveys. One strategy is to incorporate employee views into decisions about specific employment-related policies and programs. Knowing how employees feel about specific issues can provide guidance needed for decision-making about those policies and programs. Vacation policies, leave of absence practices, educational support programs, and telecommuting policies are all examples of issues that can benefit from employee input during the decision-making process.

Systematic data gathering can be done using routine systems such as direct employee accessing and updating of the HRIS records. Regular sampling of employee attitudes can be done automatically once the system has been set in place to generate questionnaires to a sampling of the workforce. Questionnaires can be modified as needed to test opinions about evolving issues.

Data is essential to decision-making. When there are routine visitations made to topics such as employee benefits, compensation, and performance appraisal systems, having data gathering processes in place to accumulate information needed makes those discussions easier. Informed decisions are better than those made in the dark.

Analyzing Information for Evaluation

Raw data might be interesting, but it is usually easier to use if it is summarized and transformed into statistics and charts. The number of hours employees are absent because of illness may be interesting, but it is more useful to look at it when it has been summarized into statistics such as absence rates. Displaying the relationship between two or more different data items means more when viewed over time.

Other examples of data that can be useful when evaluated over time can include anything that would permit trend plotting. Median compensation paid to a given job category, average employee training hours per year, and percentage of employees still on the job 1 year after hiring are all examples of data relationships that can be plotted on a graph to represent trends over time, as shown in Figure 7-1.

Figure 7-1     Sample data summary display with trend line

Sponsoring Process Improvement Initiatives

There is usually more than one way to accomplish a goal. The same can be said of most processes used in the workplace. You tend to use processes because they exist, not because they are the best. What exists and works pretty well takes no effort to change. If you want to make changes, you must invest effort.

Improving processes is not always encouraged precisely because it takes time and effort. It may also take other resources like budget dollars. For example, the recruiting links we have on our company web site are used by people interested in our job openings. If we wish to modify the process to include an invitation to self-identify disabled and veteran status during the application process (which is now required of all federal contractors), we must involve the people who actually write the code for these additional steps in the process.

HR can offer support or withhold support for such changes in processes having to do with employee data. Designing a new employee survey can take considerable time. Hiring an outside consulting firm to do that can cost considerable money. HR can decide to either support or oppose the creation of a new employee survey based on all the factors known at the time.

Sponsoring initiatives to improves processes is an HR opportunity to influence/improve the overall workings of company systems. These initiatives can be spontaneous from employee suggestions (“The handling of new employee orientation would be better if…”) or structured (from a study group assigned to assess and improve the performance evaluation process).

Communicating Impact for Data Analysis

Data has no value until it is communicated to those who can use it. Human resource professionals play a critical role in employer organizations because they have ownership of many data elements regarding employment activities. How HR people decide to pass along that data will determine the effectiveness of HR and the impact of the data.

For example, when it is determined that certain recruiting sources are more productive than others, helping the hiring managers understand where candidate riches are is a role HR can play. When HR explains to senior managers the cost of discrimination complaints, even though they are investigated internally and do not result in external agency complaints, it falls to the executive team to take any policy actions that HR recommends.

Building Effective and Creative Policies

When local, state, or federal legislation specifies how employees are to be treated, HR should craft policies that will ensure the organization is in compliance. When there is no legislation but regulatory rules specify the handling of employee issues, again HR professionals should guide their organizations to implement policies that will ensure compliance.

When managers are making decisions that treat similarly situated employees quite differently, it is time for HR to step in and create policies that can be recommended for standardizing that treatment when those conditions arise.

When no one seems to know how things should be done and the circumstances will likely recur, it should be no wonder that HR is expected to step in and create policies that will address those situations.

Using Environmental Factors in Decision-Making

Political, sociological, economic, technological, legal, and environmental are all factors that influence decision-making within employment organizations. Responsible business leaders look for ways to minimize the impact of their decisions on the environment. That means, for example, that energy consumption and energy sources come into play. Should the company invest in solar or wind power generation to offset carbon-based generation sources? Should systems be developed that will permit the recycling of water in the production of company products? If so, perhaps the overall use of “new” water can be reduced.

Customers are voting with their wallets these days. Organizations that consider the impact on environmental factors will win the race for consumer dollars when compared with sources or products and services that ignore such things.

Challenging Assumptions

Critical evaluation isn’t complete until you review your work and identify assumptions that have been made. What happens if you don’t check for assumptions? Well, here are some examples:⁵⁴

•   IBM focused on mainframe sales in the 1980s while servers and PCs got more sales.

•   Blockbuster held onto retail stores when streaming and DVD sales exploded.

•   Nokia did not recognize smartphones as important but held onto standard cell phones.

The impacts of these oversights were serious financial penalties. In HR terms, it behooves you to keep track of the leading-edge trends or our competitors will be able to attract the talent that you would like to have. What are you doing for paid parental leave, employee lounge areas for rest breaks, or paid health care benefits that include dental and vision coverage? You can bet your competitors are considering all of these things as tools for recruiting and retaining tomorrow’s workforce.

Providing a Strategic View

“Critical analysis of the strategic management process focuses on the way managers develop strategies to achieve company goals. Since carrying out the strategy requires the support of the whole company, you have to evaluate how well you achieve such an acceptance of your strategy. You can build consensus by demonstrating to employees that the strategy looks after their interests, while motivating employees to look beyond their own interests to the well-being of the group as a whole. An example is profit-sharing, which rewards each team member but only to the extent that the team as a whole performs well.”⁵⁵

HR professionals provide critical input to strategic development and implementation of the strategic plan. Your problem analysis and decision-making are not complete until you evaluate how the decision will fit into the strategic plan.

Summary

In this section of Chapter 7, we examined the behaviors associated with critical evaluation. All HR professionals will find it necessary to use these behaviors when performing their jobs. Looking past the obvious to what is actually driving people to do what they do is essential. Gathering data, assessing that data, and using the information to make quality decisions is something all HR professionals should be able to do. There is no more “shooting from the hip.” Conscious exploration of alternatives and impact now drive the modern HR function.

Chapter Review

Chapter 7 has been about behavioral competencies that apply to HR professionals. These are things that HR people are expected to be able to say and do given any set of circumstances they may face. Proper responses depend on experience, careful thought, and knowledge. It isn’t enough to memorize facts. What is important is how those facts can be blended with the situation to produce a proper response or employee treatment. That is called situational awareness. HR professionals must be capable of working with problems within their context. It isn’t enough to say, “You can’t use that written employment test.” There needs to be an analysis of why the test was wanted by the hiring manager in the first place. Situationally, there may be some valid alternative approaches to the real problem of identifying the talent needed. Behavioral competencies are a critical part of an HR professional’s life.

Questions

1.   Allison is the HR manager in her organization. She has just been told she must find a supplier for employee service awards. As it turns out, she is well acquainted with all of the local companies offering such products. One of them is owned by her husband. Given that circumstance, what should Allison do about placing an order?

A.   Since she knows she can get a good deal from her husband’s company, she should select it as the vendor.

B.   The professional HR code that deals with conflicts of interest would prevent her from selecting her husband’s company because it could appear as favoritism for personal gain whether this is the case or not.

C.   As long as Allison treats her husband’s company as an equal in consideration of vendors, there should be no problem.

D.   Allison should seek vendors outside the local area just to avoid any contamination of her ultimate selection.

2.   Shimone has been recently promoted to senior HR representative. On nearly the first day of her work in the new position, one of her internal clients comes to her with a request to approve an expense voucher. When she reads the voucher, she sees it will be a payment to a foreign government agency to help facilitate her company’s sale of product to their country. What ethical issues, if any, should Shimone be cognizant of?

A.   There are no ethical issues. It is a legitimate government payment like any permit application process in this country.

B.   There is an ethical issue. HR should support every sales effort regardless where it is taking place around the globe. Yet, Shimone is right to be concerned. She has approval authority only up to a certain amount. In this case, she will “fudge” the limit and sign off anyway.

C.   There are no ethical issues. There is nothing in this transaction that would raise any questions about ethics.

D.   There is an ethical issue. The story sounds like she will be giving a bribe to someone in the foreign government. That is both illegal and unethical.

3.   It is Thursday, and just as you reach your desk, the phone rings. On the other end of the line is an employee saying one of the company’s executives sexually assaulted her. After a 3-month-long investigation, you have gathered volumes of testimony from the employee’s co-workers. But there were no witnesses to the assault. And the executive has denied all charges. He didn’t even contend a consensual encounter was behind the current complaint. He just says, “Nothing happened.”

During the complaint investigation you discover this accused executive is the key contact for your company with a major international customer. What will you do at the conclusion of the investigation, assuming the employee has more credibility than the executive in this complaint? There are no witnesses to the assault, but co-worker statements support the employee’s credibility as well. The company sees itself as an ethical organization, and it rewards managers for ethical behavior on occasion.

A.   The key contact status is a major mitigation of the sexual harassment charges. The company can’t afford to lose the customer’s business. It would be appropriate to support retention of the executive in the current job until some other person is able to take over as key contact with that customer.

B.   Immediate suspension is appropriate in this circumstance. There is no ethical barrier to taking that action.

C.   Ethics are not an issue in this type of situation. The best business decision is to keep the executive in his job and reassign the complaining employee to some other work group.

D.   Postponing any discipline or corrective action with the executive because of his key contact status with a key customer is wrong. It amounts to treating the executive differently from the way other management people have been treated in similar circumstances if you ignore the key contact component. Inconsistency in treatment is unethical. You decide to recommend appropriate discipline based on the evidence you have and comparable other cases. It doesn’t matter how much pressure you are getting to do otherwise.

4.   Jose has always been a good employee. He has been at work promptly and worked hard throughout his shift. His manager gives him top marks for his attitude and performance. The manager says, “If I had more like Jose, we would never have to worry about production.”

Then one day, Jose gets a call and has to rush home for a family emergency. Later, just about quitting time, he remembered he didn’t clock out. He called his buddy Guillermo and asked him to punch out for him. Guillermo says, “Sure, no problem.”

A few days later, Jose’s manager is reviewing the time cards and finds the time card was altered from actual work hours. Jose didn’t work the afternoon, but his time card says he did. Is this a termination offense? Are there any ethical issues for you as the HR director?

A.   There are ethical issues if what has happened involves a cover-up at any level. Jose’s lack of intention to deceive by having a friend clock him out at the end of the day may be a mitigating factor based on company policy. Endorsing the cover-up by giving Jose a “pass” on his behavior would be unethical. Falsifying time cards is still a serious issue.

B.   Falsifying time cards is a disciplinary issue, not an ethical issue.

C.   HR should not be involved in this situation. It is up to Jose’s manager to dole out whatever discipline is appropriate.

D.   What’s the big deal? Jose is a good performer. Cut him some slack. Keep him happy.

5.   When Achmed became an HR professional, there were only four people in the HR department. The other three staff members were women. Achmed has trouble working with women and giving them the respect they deserve. Nonetheless, he attempts to be careful to make sure that doesn’t interfere with his personal job interactions.

Achmed should do the following to be sure his bias doesn’t impact his job-related decision-making.

A.   Often bias won’t surface except in rare circumstances. Achmed should not be worried. He knows his colleagues will tell him when he has become too obnoxious.

B.   What does it matter if he is a bit heavy-handed with the women he interacts with on the job? In the end, it is really his decision that counts. As long as it doesn’t reflect a bias, there should be no issue.

C.   Ask for feedback from women with whom he interacts. Request that they tell him how he can improve his interpersonal skills. Ask for input about his fairness in approaching the problem being discussed. He can work on identifying when his bias is trying to break through and influence his decision-making.

D.   The best approach is for him to wait for women to get upset with him so he can get good input about his bias.

6.   Juanita is the HR representative for her assigned department. She handles all of the HR issues that come up. Recently, Juanita saw an article in the news about a new requirement that will likely impact her company’s workers. She decides that the company lawyers will probably take responsibility for digesting that information and distributing it to the HR professionals. What would you tell Juanita about her decision?

A.   Her decision is a good one. She obviously doesn’t have time to spend scouring through the news for new HR requirements. And it is the lawyer’s responsibility to follow legal changes, right?

B.   Her decision is a good one. She doesn’t have responsibility for tracking new legal requirements that apply to HR management issues.

C.   Her decision is not a good one. She should accept responsibility for detecting and studying new legal requirements as they apply to the HR profession. Certification requirements point out that it is the HR professional, as well as the legal staff, who should be monitoring these changes.

D.   Her decision is not a good one. It isn’t the inside attorney who should be monitoring these new requirements; it is the outside attorney. What else does that consulting attorney do if not tracking legal requirement changes related to the HR staff?

7.   It is commonly known that one of the senior vice presidents in your company has a business on the side that involves maintenance of electronic copy machines, including Xerox and Cannon. When your company begins its search for a new vendor to handle copier maintenance, the senior vice president raises his hand and says he can give the company a really good deal on the cost of a machine maintenance contract. What should you do when you hear this?

A.   Confirm that he wants to participate. Identify whatever policies or code of ethics elements may have bearing on the circumstance. If there is a conflict of interest, you can discuss it with the senior vice president and tell him he may not compete for the copier maintenance contract. If there is no conflict-of-interest policy, you can escalate the issue to the president/CEO and recommend against allowing the senior vice president’s participation.

B.   Making exceptions to any policy when appropriate is something the HR department can recommend. It is OK to permit the senior vice president to compete for the new maintenance contract. As long as the contract is awarded based on random access data about vendor proposals, there won’t be a conflict of interest.

C.   Identify any policy the company may have on conflict of interest. Once identified, review the conditions under which an officer of the company can submit a vendor proposal to gain revenues from your company. If there isn’t such a policy, a discussion with the president/CEO would be appropriate to determine what policy elements could be desirable for future implementation.

D.   Why can’t the senior vice president own an independent company and participate in the vendor selection process? The person who will make the vendor selection is two levels below the senior vice president, although in the senior VP’s management group.

8.   As a new venture, your company is doing quite well. When you arrived to head the HR department, however, there were no company policies. You believe they are necessary so everyone on the payroll can know what is expected of them. Almost immediately you set off to create policies for conduct expectations, honesty expectations, time-off rules, and payroll expectations. Then a complaint is filed against your boss claiming he has been having a sexual relationship with one of the HR department clerks. Is this a problem? Why?

A.   Yes. It’s a problem because complaints mean a lot of people will start nosing around, poking themselves into private affairs.

B.   No. It’s not a problem. As long as the clerk doesn’t report directly to your boss, there can be no negative impact from their consensual relationship.

C.   Yes. It’s a problem because HR professionals are expected to set the standard for ethical behavior. Having a sexual relationship with someone in his own department says to other employees that it is OK to ignore training about sexual harassment and do whatever you want.

D.   No. It’s not a problem as long as the relationship is consensual and the clerk is over 21 years old. Where is this complaint coming from anyway?

9.   You have been serving as an HR professional for more than 20 years now. In your current assignment you have been working to identify the organization’s values and strategies. And you have been working to assess HR policies to be sure they support those organizational values and strategies. Why is that appropriate?

A.   If HR policies don’t support values and strategies, it will be difficult to get the employee body to work toward the organizational values. If strategies for the organization are different from HR policies, employees are likely to be left out of the journey to the organization’s vision.

B.   If HR policies don’t support values and strategies, it will mean that almost all employees will find it hard to link their jobs to the organizational values.

C.   If HR policies don’t support values and strategies, the executive team will begin asking questions about the importance of the HR department to the organization. Somewhere along the line the HR department may become irrelevant.

D.   If HR policies don’t support values and strategies, there is no problem. HR policies are in place so they can be interpreted in each case as events develop. Nothing is written in stone. It’s all good.

10.   It’s May and the start of your “season of the interns.” Your company is a federal contractor and always hires student interns to expose them to actual workday requirements of the job and ideally have them consider working here after they graduate. Yesterday, your CEO came to you and said his next-door neighbor’s daughter needs a job, and he said she could work here. He wants you to put her on the payroll. What should you do?

A.   There is no ethical conflict. The executives of the company get to decide how the company will be staffed. Hiring by directive is an acceptable and ethical strategy.

B.   You should explain the ethics of not getting a job requisition number to start with. Once that is done, you can hire the neighbor’s daughter and close the job requisition without a problem.

C.   You should explain the ethics of following the company’s hiring process. Federal contractors would find it particularly problematic when complying with recruiting and hiring regulations come into play. You need to assess how ethical it would be to open a job requisition and then close it with only one candidate without any announcement of opportunity to others.

D.   You can ignore the normal process and just do what the CEO has asked you to do. The boss is in charge. Anything they want can be done.

11.   Sadie is a new HR analyst, and this is her first professional HR job. Her first assignment is to determine how other companies in the area are handling the problem cost of housing is creating for employee recruiting. What should Sadie keep in mind above all else?

A.   Never disclose any information to other companies.

B.   Don’t discuss the issue with any of our own employees.

C.   Her credibility will be based on the quality of the work she produces.

D.   She should call her boss each time a question comes up about the project.

12.   Renaldo has just been appointed director of HR. At the same time, the company has announced a merger that will result in a new line of business. How can Renaldo make the transition easier for the merging company employees?

A.   Negotiate with the new company executives how the employment policies of the two companies can be merged and on what timeline.

B.   Negotiate with the new company executives what service awards will be presented to people in the new organization.

C.   Negotiate with the current company executives what office space they will be giving up to the new people.

D.   Negotiate with the current company executives how parking spaces will be allocated.

13.   HR professionals must be open to the ideas of others based on:

A.   The financial backing that they can offer

B.   The similarities they have to U.S. expectations

C.   Decisions made at headquarters that demand conformity to policies

D.   Experience, data, facts, and reasoned judgment

14.   The best way managers and HR professionals can learn from others is to:

A.   Encourage employees to send in anonymous suggestions for improvement

B.   Invite them to correct the manager’s decision-making methods

C.   Express self-awareness and humility

D.   Tell them you understand their culture pretty well

15.   Industry characteristics should be part of an HR professional’s study list because:

A.   Industry requirements can vary considerably based on the type of products and services it demands.

B.   Industry associations demand that HR professionals submit information about employee compensation and benefit programs.

C.   Industry competitors are going to get greater revenues if you don’t adjust your programs based on how competitors are doing their work.

D.   Industry representatives dictate the HR programs that must be adopted by each corporate employer.

16.   Shirley is new to her job as director of human resources. She has been asked by the CEO to prepare a business case supporting HR’s representation in executive strategic planning sessions. What should Shirley do to create that business case?

A.   She should give the job to her lieutenant as a developmental assignment.

B.   She should follow the ten-element process from problem identification to action planning.

C.   She should identify at least five reasons why HR needs to be included in the planning process.

D.   She should call a friend at a competitor’s company and ask what they did.

17.   Anton has been VP of HR for 3 years now. He has been gradually adding metrics to the HR department since he took over as leader. Are there practical limits to the amount of metrics that can exist in an organization?

A.   Yes. If there are too many metrics, nobody will get anything done other than generating data for the measurements.

B.   No. Any quantity of measurements is acceptable as long as each one can be linked to another department.

C.   Yes. More than ten metrics will choke an HR department and bring its production to a standstill.

D.   No. Any amount of metrics is acceptable as long as they are each measuring a critical component of HR work product.

18.   Elliot has just been invited to present an analysis of employee benefit programs that the executive team wants to consider for use beginning next year. How should he do that?

A.   An ROI analysis is the best approach.

B.   Getting anecdotal evidence from competitors who are using the programs is the best approach.

C.   Getting vendor input is critical to the best approach.

D.   Preparing a narrative analysis is the best approach.

19.   Latisha is a new HR analyst. She has been tasked with training her contacts in client departments on the changes in medical insurance benefit programs for this year. How should she handle that assignment?

A.   Provide managers the option to sit in on the training or skip the program.

B.   Study the benefit programs so she is an expert in the provisions of each plan and all the changes that will be made this year.

C.   Take the literature from the insurance companies and distribute it to the client managers in the training session.

D.   Ask the registration clerk to come along to the training sessions to answer questions about the plans.

20.   Rolly has been director of HR at his company for 2 years. He is now facing the task of making use of all the employee data that is available to him. What should he do?

A.   Delegate the project. Get a clerk to gather all the data and find a way to handle it.

B.   Bring in a consultant to write a computer program that will digest the employee data and spit out comparisons that will help in decision-making.

C.   Review the data personally and determine which analytical tool he should use to “crunch the numbers” and get some comparative results.

D.   Send the data to a consultant off-site for review and analysis.

21.   Savanah has just been appointed to the HR staff as an entry-level professional. What should she recognize about the need for critical evaluation in her decision-making?

A.   She must be able to interpret information and make business recommendations to those who will decide on the organization’s direction.

B.   She must rely on HR analysts to provide her with evaluation of the issues she faces. Then, she should make any policy decisions needed.

C.   She must recognize that any situation with less than total descriptive information can’t be addressed by critical evaluation.

D.   She must depend on her external contacts to provide the evaluation of HR policies in other organizations.

22.   Elliott is a senior HR analyst in his organization. What impact do you think new state and federal laws will have on his work?

A.   It depends on whether the new laws have local impact. HR can’t make that determination. It is important for HR professionals to get outside legal input.

B.   It is the legal staff that should be paying attention to the new laws. HR really has no significant role to play in that regard.

C.   Each new piece of legislation that impacts HR issues is important and must be a consideration for Elliott’s analysis work.

D.   In these days, having an attorney on the HR staff is a good idea. Elliott should always rely on that HR staff lawyer.

23.   When inputs to HR on any given workday become so varied and intense, the HR professionals must do what?

A.   Issues should always be handled in the order they were received. “First in, first served” should be the motto.

B.   HR must do triage and determine the priority for each new issue. Then deal with issues in priority order.

C.   Priorities, once set, should not be changed. Commitments must be honored and receive attention as originally determined.

D.   Benefits issues should always be handled first, followed by payroll issues and union issues.

24.   Sofia has just been asked to draft a new policy for employee engagement efforts and programs. What key components should her analysis include?

A.   HR, accounting, production, and budget

B.   Office staff, production staff, recruiting staff, and legal staff

C.   Productivity, engagement, recruiting, retention, and budget

D.   Competitors, industrial associations, congressional actions, and budget

25.   There is so much data involved in HR problems. How is a new HR professional supposed to handle it all?

A.   Every HR professional must be a certified professional statistician so all the data analysis can be certified as accurate.

B.   There is no need for HR professionals to be certified professional statisticians; they just need to be able to do a defensible regression analysis with 15 or more variables.

C.   When the data elements get to be overwhelming, HR professionals should just pick the most important for their analysis and ignore the rest.

D.   Refining problem statements so they are more specific is one important way to reduce the data overload problem.

Situational Judgment Scenario-Based Questions

Scenario 1 (Questions 26–29): You answer your phone, and it is Nancy, the CEO’s executive assistant. She wants to know whether you could come talk with the CEO in 15 minutes. When you reply you will be right up, Nancy hesitates and then adds that she wants you to keep who you are meeting with to yourself. You are intrigued but assure Nancy you will comply with her request.

When you get to the CEO’s office, Marian is not there, but Nancy asks you to take a seat in her office, saying Marian will be right back. Sure enough, Marian soon arrives and asks whether she may speak freely and in confidence. You respond, “Absolutely.” Marian goes on to say she wants your advice as she thinks she needs to fire one of her C-suite members, so of course she needs to do it right. You are surprised that you’ve been asked for this help and not your vice president of human resources, Hank, but you keep listening. The CEO has received e-mails from three different employees claiming different degrees of sexual harassment, all naming the same member of the C-suite. These allegations of behavior are different from what Marian has experienced with this executive.

26.   What is one of your first questions for the CEO?

A.   Is the C-suite member’s performance otherwise okay?

B.   Is this C-suite member a key financial contributor?

C.   What investigatory steps have been taken?

D.   What succession plan do you have in place for this C-suite member?

27.   Marian gives you printouts of the three e-mails she referenced and asks you to talk to “who you think you need to talk to, please.” Who will that include?

A.   The three employees

B.   The three employees and the accused

C.   The three employees, their supervisors, and the accused

D.   The three employees, their supervisors, the accused, and anyone else who becomes relevant based upon your interviews

28.   Marian tells you that if you have any resistance setting up your meetings, you should share that you are doing this at her request. She asks that you meet with her again to give a verbal update as soon as you have news to report. In that second meeting, you share more details from e-mail writers, that every supervisor reported their employee was credible, and that the accused was shocked, outraged, and refused to cooperate once he understood the purpose of the meeting. Based upon this data gathering, what do you report to the CEO?

A.   You will make a recommendation based upon the preponderance of the evidence.

B.   You can’t make a recommendation without more information from the accused.

C.   You need your vice president, Hank, to make such an important recommendation.

D.   You want to turn your notes over to the firm’s legal counsel to make the recommendation.

29.   Marian says you have provided her with enough information and looks forward to quickly receiving your written report. She asks whether you have any additional related comments. How do you respond?

A.   “No, but thank you for the learning assignment.”

B.   “Yes, we should do sexual harassment prevention training for all supervisors within the company.”

C.   “Yes, why didn’t this assignment go to Hank?”

D.   “No,” but you wonder the reason this assignment didn’t go to Hank.

Scenario 2 (Questions 30–33): You have been tasked to prepare a report the VP of human resources has requested for the senior leadership team. You will need to figure out what data is available, how to display it, and how to interpret what it means.

30.   Ideally you will be able to include all the following except which one?

A.   Current organizational turnover rates

B.   Historical organizational turnover rates

C.   Your industry turnover rates

D.   National turnover rates

31.   Looking at the data you have gathered on your organizational turnover rates, it would be best to share the data by what feature?

A.   Department

B.   Title

C.   Length of service

D.   Whichever way shares greater insight

32.   Looking at the data you have gathered on your organizational turnover rates, it would be best to share the data using which of the following?

A.   A bar chart

B.   A matrix

C.   A Pareto chart

D.   A Six Sigma

33.   Looking at the data you have gathered on your organizational turnover rates, when you share the data, you want to be sure to include what?

A.   All the detailed data you collected, so senior management may draw their own conclusions

B.   All the detailed data you collected, so senior management will appreciate all the hard work you have done

C.   Your insights about your turnover rates and whether they are good or bad

D.   Your insights about your turnover rates and whether they are good or bad, plus recommendations on how to make the rates better

Scenario 3 (Questions 34–37): You have been a director of human resources in California for 7 years now. Your firm has just completed an acquisition of a new operations group in Texas that has more employees working at it than your California operations, so you have overnight more than doubled in size. You just got your hands on their current employee handbook and are comparing it to the one you recently updated in California. While the California handbook has a policy that bans firearms from all work locations, the Texas handbook is silent on the issue. Another difference is California’s handbook states a zero-tolerance policy for any violence, and again the Texas handbook is silent.

As you FaceTime with the local human resources manager prior to your planned trip to Texas next week, Serena tells you about an operations technician, Martin, who was terminated last week for making threats toward a co-worker as they were both interested in the same woman who is the company’s receptionist.

34.   Turning your attention to fired Martin, what follow-up question do you want to ask Serina first?

A.   What is the name of the receptionist?

B.   What security measures are in place at the Texas plant?

C.   What is the name of the co-worker who had threats made against him?

D.   Do you have good operations technician applicants available?

35.   What is one of the first steps you are going to take regarding the differences in policies?

A.   Make all the handbooks the same, following the Texas lead, since it has more employees who are familiar with those policies.

B.   Make all the handbooks the same, following the lead of California, since that is the company that did the acquiring.

C.   Make all the handbooks the same, following the lead of California, since California is famous for having more complicated employment laws for compliance.

D.   Engage Serina in conversation about the areas of silence for better understanding.

36.   You realize your options for the policies are to keep your policies separate, adopt one of the two for all, integrate the two, or start fresh. What will influence you most in your choice of approach?

A.   The approach you can implement the fastest to get through the change quickly

B.   The values of the combined company going forward

C.   The mission, vision, and values of the combined company going forward

D.   The mission and vision of the combined company going forward

37.   What is your best approach to convince the new leadership team of your proposed newly integrated policies related to firearms and workplace violence?

A.   Talk in individual sessions with each leader to explain the risks to the corporation and employees.

B.   Discuss the topic at a meeting of the leadership team, outlining the general risk and what some mitigating measures are.

C.   Share examples and facts from the news and about growing workplace violence and its financial risk with the leadership team and then offer your prepared solutions for your firm.

D.   Share examples and facts from the news and about growing workplace violence and its financial risk with all the stakeholders of the firm.

Scenario 4 (Questions 38–42): Nadine, the director of marketing, is having a serious performance problem with a key marketing analyst, Andrew. Andrew has been with the firm for three years and is a 41-year-old minority. Andrew’s initial 6-month review was satisfactory. After that, the appraisals have continued to be satisfactory, but marginally so.

You talked the director of marketing out of firing Andrew for employment at will and got her to agree to put Andrew on a performance improvement plan (PIP). You convinced her that for the PIP to work, she’d need to make expectations for work quantity and quality clear to Andrew and to meet with him weekly to provide regular feedback.

38.   It is now 30 days later, and Nadine wants to meet with you concerning Andrew. What will you want to know from Nadine?

A.   How is Andrew’s performance in terms of quality?

B.   How often did Nadine meet and give feedback?

C.   How is Andrew’s performance in terms of quality?

D.   How often did they meet, and how is Andrew’s overall performance?

39.   Thirty-two days after Andrew’s PIP began, you meet with Nadine. She reports that Andrew’s quality is about the same as before and his quantity of analytical reports has gone up slightly. She met with him initially to put him on the PIP and then just met with him a second time 3 days ago. Nadine wants to fire Andrew. What is your counsel to Nadine?

A.   Agree completely and offer to prepare the final check plus remind Nadine it is best practice to have another manager present when she terminates Andrew.

B.   Agree completely and offer to prepare the final check and be in the room with Nadine when she terminates Andrew.

C.   Disagree, saying termination now is premature since there has been some improvement and there has been imperfect feedback.

D.   Disagree, saying termination now is premature as there isn’t time to get a special termination check this week.

40.   In that meeting 32 days after the start of Andrew’s PIP you gently ask Nadine to help you understand the reason she didn’t engage in more feedback meetings with Andrew. She tells you work has been overwhelming, especially with marginal performers on her staff, and that she had to go out of state for 2 weeks to arrange for hospice for her father. What is your response?

A.   Condolences for her father’s condition and a gentle reminder of her managerial duties

B.   Condolences for her father’s condition and your advice on how best to proceed with Andrew

C.   Condolences for her father’s condition, your advice on how best to proceed with Andrew, and a reminder of your employee assistance program

D.   Knowing you are to stay professional, you give her a gentle reminder of her managerial duties

41.   If Nadine wants to go forward with the termination, what advice do you want to give to her?

A.   Advise Nadine that since all the performance appraisals are satisfactory and improvement was made during the 30-day PIP, you think the paper trail is insufficient to warrant going forward with the termination at this time.

B.   Advise Nadine that since all the performance appraisals are satisfactory and improvement was made during the 30-day PIP, suggest finding an alternate job in another department for Andrew.

C.   Advise Nadine that since all the performance appraisals are satisfactory and improvement was made during the 30-day PIP, direct Nadine to set up a meeting with your legal counsel for suggested possible actions.

D.   Advise Nadine that since all the performance appraisals are satisfactory and improvement was made during the 30-day PIP, since she’s going through a lot right now, you will handle the termination for her to provide excellent internal customer service to her.

42.   What further advice do you want to give to Nadine, knowing Andrew is in at least two protected groups?

A.   Don’t terminate too hastily since Andrew has the right to file a complaint with EEOC, alleging his termination was biased based upon his protected-class status.

B.   Don’t get too stressed over Andrew’s termination since you have personal issues going on and Andrew is an at-will employee.

C.   Don’t terminate too hastily since the director could instead ask Andrew if he’d like to resign.

D.   Don’t get too stressed over Andrew’s termination since your human resource group has prescreened a number of qualified marketing analyst applicants.

Scenario 5 (Questions 43–46): You are an HR manager in one of the states that have decriminalized marijuana, starting in 3 months. You are getting comments from supervisors concerned that they will have lost productivity and a break room that smells of that “wacky tabacky,” and they dread it.

43.   What is one of the first steps you are going to take in response to this situation?

A.   Gather data from SHRM chapters in states where marijuana has already been decriminalized.

B.   Research the exact wording of the law in your state.

C.   Confirm the law hasn’t changed at the federal level.

D.   Conduct an employee survey to ask how many employees plan to partake.

44.   You are revising your internal policies to include your corporate response to marijuana. Part of that process will include what?

A.   Present all the options for a response to your leadership team so they may decide.

B.   Present all the options for a response to your vice president of HR so she may decide.

C.   Run the draft of your new policies past some respected colleagues in other departments.

D.   Post the draft of your new policies in the break room and set up a suggestion box next to it for comments.

45.   What is a key message you want everyone to understand in your new policies?

A.   In 3 months, the company parties are going to get a lot more fun.

B.   All employees must be mentally and physically able to execute their responsibilities safely.

C.   All employees should be reminded of your sick time policy.

D.   All employees must be reminded of your attendance policy.

46.   The manager with the greatest concerns approaches you with an article in hand stating that marijuana is still a controlled substance under federal law. In response, you do what?

A.   Say thanks for the article, but you already knew that.

B.   Give thanks for the article and realize if illegal at the federal level, there is no need to change your policies.

C.   Assure the manager that the federal law is changing any day now.

D.   Assure the manager your new policies state there will be no ADA nor ADAAA accommodation for medical use of marijuana.