Employee Success: Your Greatest Lever for Business Success
Quantum Workplace is a Business Reporter client.
Many businesses have mastered product and customer success, but few have figured out how to maximize employee success.
Success is a universal ambition in business. Many businesses have mastered their offering and have loyal customers to prove it, but few have managed to tap into the potential of their greatest lever for business success: their talent.
True success is achieved when businesses have engaged and productive employees who create exemplary products or services that delight and retain their customers.
Companies that fail to engage and motivate their employees find it difficult to succeed, suffer from increased turnover and have difficulty growing revenue and profit. Industry leaders connect the dots between employee engagement and employee performance—and know how to drive employee, team and business success.
Empowering your CHRO to drive business success
If employee success is your greatest lever, your biggest catalyst is your HR leadership. They play a huge role in the success of your employees—and therefore your business.
Effective HR leaders know the ins and outs of what’s happening with their people. They have access to data that shows what’s going well (and what’s not) with employees. They are uniquely positioned to drive business success metrics when they have strong and strategic partnerships with senior leadership.
But too many HR departments operate in a silo, disconnected and misaligned with the strategic goals of the business as a whole. A Gartner survey found that 70% of CEOs expect their chief human resources officer (CHRO) to be a key player in enterprise strategy, but only 55% say their CHRO meets this expectation.
If you want to build alignment and leverage your CHRO to positively impact your business, you need to lean on HR as a strategic partner. Here’s how you can view and work differently with HR leadership to drive business success.
1. Expect more from your HR leaders
Building a successful talent strategy requires a deep understanding of how different roles, functions and departments work. Your HR leaders are plugged into the organization through your workforce and can help you look at business challenges with a people-focused lens.
Create a shared understanding of your business by ensuring that HR leaders have access to information about products, services and strategy to propel your business forward.
2. Nudge leaders to advocate for and support each other
Talent-savvy leaders recognize that increasing employee engagement can improve how well employees perform at work and can bolster business results. Senior leaders who are strategic partners and team players will help you achieve your desired results faster, for longer.
Prioritize communication among your C-suite to stay aligned and on a path to success.
3. Make data-driven business decisions
Business decisions should be driven by data and evidence, not hunches or assumptions. Your CHRO can help you identify key insights and drive action on the right things, at the right time.
Work with HR to review, analyze and integrate your data with key performance metrics to impact the most critical areas of your business.
4. Invest in your people management teams
The largest spend for most organizations is workforce costs. Yet many HR departments remain vastly underfunded.
Gartner’s HR Investment: Budget and Staffing Snapshot reports that most HR functions spend an average of $1,350 to $3,800 per employee [annually?] and have a HR-employee ratio of 1:66. Organizations looking to maximize employee and business success should use this as a minimum when thinking about their people investments.
Partner with your CHRO to help you determine what organizational resources and support are needed to make the biggest impact on your talent strategy.
5. Share the responsibility
To grow and succeed, you can’t be constantly stuck in firefighter mode. You must zoom out and think about the long-term future of your organization, while your leadership team makes progress on the ground level.
Lean on your CHRO to influence and direct your talent initiatives to recruit, engage and retain talented employees that help your business succeed.
Empowering your employees to drive business success
It seems like a no-brainer: Employee success drives business success. Our research found that common drivers of employee success include:
- Trust in managers and top leadership to lead the business to success
- Belief in the future success of the business
- Recognition for contributing to business success
- Development opportunities and a future with the organization
However, employee engagement and performance are often neglected in favor of other business priorities.
A study conducted by Harvard Business Review Analytic Services, in association with Quantum Workplace, found that more than half of business executives say the primary business goals for their organizations’ investments in talent are productivity and retention. Yet only one in three say their organizations have actually improved these areas as a result of their investment.
To drive business success, you need leaders who can help you motivate and empower your employees. Organizations who do this well will:
- Capture, listen to and act on employee feedback
- Align individual and team goals with business objectives
- Encourage frequent check-ins to increase clarity and communication
- Recognize and celebrate employee success
- Make data-driven decisions for employee success initiatives
- Leverage technology to stay focused on business success
When you invest in your talent and build alignment across the organization, everyone pulls together with a common purpose—resulting in higher levels of employee engagement, stronger performance and greater business success.
Find out how you can leverage your HR team and activate your talent to achieve business success with Quantum Workplace’s free Business Success toolkit.
