Growing your HR department can be a daunting task. There are a cluster of chores you have to undertake to get a passionate workforce aiming at an overarching company vision. The balancing act of managing these 2 situations is like being delicately poised on a knife's edge, hundreds of feet in the air.

But as difficult a stunt that is, you have to master it if your company has any chance at long term success. And in just 5 steps, we'll be revealing how to understand your HR department for what it is now and help equip it to become a department capable of engaging passionate staff aiming at your business goals.

We start with HR assignment, then HR action plan, HR staffing, Budgeting and HR company alignment. At the end of this article, you'll have the tools to grow your HR department to achieve tangible business results.

HR Assignments

It's a struggle to improve what you can't measure. If you want to grow your human resource department, you first have to assess HR for its strengths and weaknesses.

One metric many entrepreneurs overlook is their turnover rate. The average turnover rate of businesses is 20% annually. But many entrepreneurs run a higher turnover rate — a symptom of a much deeper business problem.

But that's one metric, there's employee engagement, time to hire, revenue per employee, cost per hire, quality of hire improvement, time to productivity and more. Growing HR goes beyond physical expansion, it's about an increase in effectiveness. So when assessing your HR department ask yourself this question…

To what extent is HR helping the business achieve its vision and how much better can it do?

It's a guide to help you spot what your HR is doing well and where they need to improve.

HR Action Plan

Once you can measure your HR efforts against the standard your business vision requires, its strengths and weaknesses become evident to you.

Say you look at a high annual turnover rate, you could be dealing with a much bigger problem with workplace culture where talent struggles to perform. Or maybe your HR's recruitment process is poor. Or your vision is faulty and hard to communicate to staff.

Whatever the problems are, a HR action plan would be your approach to fixing your department's weaknesses. Following one of the suggestions above, it'll be a struggle to fix workplace culture by tinkering with poor relationships and bad work attitudes in staff without a good look at company values. And there is no better way to find out the values of an organization or person than to extract it from their staff behavior across time.

Many businesses and entrepreneurs fail not because they lack passion or talent but because their values and vision do not align. No matter how much you want a mango tree, if you plant an orange seed you'll get an orange tree. So start with your vision and use it as a guide to set your values. Adjust till they both align with each other. Then act on it when working on improving your HR department. Also, you should clearly communicate both values and vision to your staff.

HR Staffing

As you assess your HR department, one thing becomes clear — there are a lot of functions HR personnel have to execute for the department to be effective. You have to maintain employee files, prepare employee payroll, there's compliance and administration, talent development and more.

And if this department is to run at full speed, you have to find competent hands to man each post.

And that's where HR staffing comes in…

For every post, you need an HR personnel who is not only competent but also a culture fit for your HR action plan. As the landscape of technology and business shifts, so is the role of HR.

We just listed some roles of HR personnel above, but HR leaders have to go above and beyond the basics. They have to successfully engage with a more energetic workforce. This would need a new approach to work itself.

There are of course key takeaways when it comes to hiring staff that apply to all departments as well as HR. When asked how to interview job prospects, Elon said he asks them to explain in detail how they solved a hard career problem they had encountered up to that point.

He said it is a good way to find talent that actually knows what they're doing. Someone who merely worked on a team that solved a tough problem won't be as familiar with the problem as another who did the actual work.

It's a good guide for any entrepreneur looking to hire an HR personnel or any staff for that matter.

HR Budget

If you're to increase the effectiveness of your HR department, then you have to rethink your HR budget. It's not enough to increase spending for your HR department without first understanding how HR activities are directly linked to the company vision and bottom-line.

Since most attempts at improving HR tend to involve inefficient use of money, entrepreneurs are wary of signing off on an increase in HR budget. There are just too many costs and little justification for such spending. There's personnel costs, software costs, employee wellness programs, general staff engagement activities, and the list is endless.

To get a better perspective of HR budgeting, you need to step back and re-examine why you need HR in the first place. While speaking to a professional sometime ago, it became evident that HR is an organization's attempt at optimizing the process of achieving their goals through the optimal use of their most important resource — humans.

Human resources can and should be justified in terms of the company's vision and bottom-line. The issue now is to go through HR activities and see how they can benefit the company both in vision and profitability. With an HR action plan that's aligned to your business ethos, you can find activities that grow the company

Human Resources - Company Alignment

Earlier on, when we talked about an HR action plan, we discussed measuring your HR efforts to the standards of your company vision. An HR department is rudderless if it's not hitched to your company's vision, as should other departments. But unlike other departments like Sales, Marketing, Finance, etc, HR is really about how other departments work internally and externally to achieve the common goal.

The process of keeping all departments aligned with the overarching vision of the company is more an ongoing process rather than a snapshot of an end result. Entrepreneurs who work on alignment are quick to find out that leaders and their departmental teams tend to be distracted with optimizing for smaller siloed goals. In which case, they lose sight of the overarching mission. As an entrepreneur, you should always understand your company vision, assess the department's trajectory, take action and assess results.

Since most attempts at improving HR tend to involve inefficient use of money, entrepreneurs are wary of signing off on an increase in HR budget. There are just too many costs and little justification for such spending. There's personnel costs, software costs, employee wellness programs, general staff engagement activities, and the list is endless.

Conclusion

Growing your HR department is really about growing your business and it's a never ending process. HR really is the glue that keeps your rocket together as it flies towards your vision as an entrepreneur. But it doesn't direct the rocket.

It's beholden on you, the business leader, to create a company vision and carry the responsibility of seeing it through. In this article, we looked at 5 steps to grow the effectiveness of your HR department. We started with assessing the department itself using important metrics or key performance indicators to know the strengths and weaknesses of your department.

Then we moved to an action plan that's business aligned to help achieve company goals. Next we examined HR staffing, discussed competence and culture fit. Then it was budgeting, where we talked about funding company aligned HR activities. And finally, maintaining HR aligned departments for an optimal pursuit of company goals.

Here's a tool to help you track and manage goals and objectives in your organisation - Doo People. Its is a risk free people platform for your business. Try it out for free and get an idea of how it can help you.