HR Toolkit 1: HR 101

I want to talk about what you need to know when you’re hiring the 1st, second, third, fourth, 20th, and 50th 100th employees. It doesn’t matter. These are the things that you need to be thinking about as soon as you are looking at hiring. I have worked with hundreds of organizations and done lots of workshops talking to small businesses and hr people; I would ask what hr is, and every time I asked that question, different answers would appear. And so the team and I went to sit down, and we said, well, let’s talk about hr and how we can describe it in a way that everyone will understand, so we came up with what hr is. Hr jouta style. So the foundation of culture is the protection and an interior over the productivity, so it’s culture protection, and productivity equals organizational performance. So let’s talk about what culture is. So culture is the workplace culture reflects everything from recruitment determination and everything in between. It’s your vision, your mission, your goals, your symbolism. It’s in part the reason you started your business. It’s why you got into it, and it’s the kind of environment you want to create. To create the greatest results for yourself and your employees, and within culture protection and productivity, there are 17 key result areas that we think align with those. So they’re the tactical pieces that make up hr, so kra is a key result area, so under culture, we’ve defined the following k-ras. Organizational intention again, which is your vision, your mission, your goals, your values, your culture, your symbolism it’s your communication it’s your internal and external. It’s your specifically thought through thorough how are we going to communicate to staff are we going to communicate to stakeholders how are we going to communicate organizational structure. That’s your roles and responsibilities that are your workforce planning, that’s your succession planning. All of those align to support the kind of environment the culture that you’re looking for. Leadership versus management, we believe that leadership and management can be fun to find a different way and that in each organization, the expectations of those roles are different. So we say as part of your culture define what a leader is defined when a manager is supposed to be and then change management how you deal with change is gonna be indicative of your culture. And you know today I don’t know change is happening every minute of every day it seems like so it’s not like you know there’s those odd big initiatives of change, but truly there’s change going on all the time. How is your environment in your culture? Do you manage that protection so just as you ensure your business against external threats protecting the organization from all the legislations that govern employment? Govern employment is just as important so. Well, the key result areas that we put under protection are legislative knowledge. So do you understand all the legislations that govern employment, and if you don’t, you know whom to call to find out? We you don’t know, do all of your employees have employment agreement metrics? Do you measure how effective your programs are over time? We’ve met lots of organizations that have things like a performance program, and they say gosh. L, it doesn’t take time, but it’s actually not giving us a return on investment. It’s really important before starting any project of any kind do you know why you’re doing it and how you will know it’s successful. I think those are two very important questions to ask and then once you put them in place, start measuring them to make sure they are effective total compensation. Make sure you’re protected in the sense that you’re paying people the right pay for the right reasons and that you’ve got base pay, understood variable pay, health, and dental benefits, income protection, retirement benefits general perks. What is your overall total compensation and making sure that you’re paying at the market level that you want to that makes sense for your organization to attract and retain hr record-keeping, making sure that you’re keeping good track of records policies and procedures I could spend a whole day on what a handbook can do for an organization I will say it can be one of the most powerful tools you have? So I encourage you if you don’t have one to consider it we’re going to talk about that more in some of the other videos if you’d like to check those out absence management is making sure that you are very clear in the way that you record absences the burden of proof is on the employer if you don’t keep good track of absences it’s going to be up to you to prove one way or the other whether the information is accurate should an employee choose to leave your employment the other one is health and safety again making sure that you’re protecting yourself and your and your staff from yeah which is making sure it’s a safe environment for them under productivity you know I think ultimately hrs job is to ensure that performance is the goal putting in good practices to ensure that it’s a great environment for people to come and work and getting the best productivity at everyone to drive ultimately organizational performance all right to me that’s the goal of hr. So under productivity key result areas, we’ve got recruitment and selection we’ve put that here because we think you know who you hire how you hire when you hire the role you put them in how you set them up for success is all part of making sure that you’re getting the highest level of productivity from employees as soon as you can. So recruitment selection, onboarding, and orientation performance are also productivity pieces how you’re holding me accountable, how you’re setting goals for me, how you assess whether or not I’m doing the job that I’m intended to do, and creating a learning work environment you know I think hr once all the stuff is in place the best part is then doing coaching and training it has that environment where people are growing and learning and then an annual review of hr practices.So you got all this stuff in place please don’t leave it for years and years we see that happen too often, and we’ll come back in you know when you call us five years later, and now your practices are so out-of-date you almost have to start over in some cases. So we encourage you to review them annually, and for some legislation, some of your practices do need to be looked at annually. If you do that on a regular basis, you’ll ensure that your practices are following the growth and projection of your organization. So let’s talk about culture. I’m going to spend a tiny bit more time on this. So Simon Sinek did a video piece called the golden circle which you can easily find on youtube. I kind of took it and did a little bit of a slant. So he believes people buy why you do what you do, not what you do. And so I want to know why you started your company. Ultimately the why is the sort of the true north. It’s the guiding principle for all employees. Why did you start your company? Why does it exist that the behavioral values that drive behavior are? So how you do what you do and then what you do is what you do. So jouta, for example, you know what we do is we hr consultants how we do it is we align to all of our values and why we do it is to ensure that you’re better off than you were before we came a couple of examples from one of some of our clients is one in particular client there what is we make x the right way I have to you know hide protects them from you know and who they are now is through their values. And so they came up with values that were honesty, attention, getting along to get along, good work ethic, enthusiasm and passion, dedication, and loyalty. There y was to make a difference. So the reason I’m talking about this, and the example right here, is that when it comes to putting together hr practices, it’s important that they’re aligned to something that relates to you. So we started using the why how what model to get an alignment or get an understanding of why you do what you do again, getting those behavioral values that I think are critically important and then connecting that to what you do and then all your hr talks to that it’s quite powerful here’s another example one client we worked with what we do is we make happy x by providing quality services and products their values for honesty respect teamwork and communication one of the things that they did in their definitions as they were very specific about honesty, for example, they say we do what we say we’re going to do and they talk about different examples. So that makes it really clear to employees the expectation of that value, how they expect employees to show up, and then why they do it. In one particular case, this client was because we gave a translation for staff is I care and one other example instead of they did our values our mission our purpose. So their purpose is to push the boundaries of technology to better explore and understand the x their values they did professional competence willing to learn customer service dedication self-motivation to market integrity and I show you these examples because what I think sometimes as people we worked with one client once he said gee I don’t know what the mission and vision or value should be, but I saw one in this office not too long ago. So he went he took the paper off the wall, and he used that for his company, and in this particular case, it worked it doesn’t always work that way it’s better to talk to the founding the founding members of the organization get really clear why you started the business what the behavioral values that you expect employees to have when they come to work for you, and I can promise you it can set an amazing foundation mazing cultural foundation to set you up to succeed to hit the goals that you’re looking for are. So what’s hr jouta style is culture protection and productivity which equals organizational performance culture again is making sure that you define it and align everything to its protection is that you protect yourself from all the legislators all the legislations that government employment and ultimately productivity that you drive behavior in the way that you want that everybody comes to work and is excited to do the best job they know how for you. This has been an initiative of the city of Penticton economic development department, and I’m cori from the jouta performance group.