Organizational Change Initiatives Often Entail Human Resource Changes
Organizational Change Initiatives need the involvement of the Human Resources (HR) function to succeed since such change initiatives are almost always dependant on personnel and human resources changes as well. Indeed, with the advent of the services sector wherein firms in the technology and financial services space treat their employees as the main asset, it is the case that any change initiatives that are driven in such firms have to have the full participation and support of the HR Function.
Further, given the fact that organizational change initiatives often entail the employees to participate wholeheartedly, the case for the HR Function to be proactive and to take the lead in fostering and actualizing such changes becomes apparent.
Use of HR Scorecard in Organizational Change Initiatives
This is where tools such as the HR Scorecard come in handy and indeed, critical since it provides a framework and a model to align the expectations from the senior leadership with the needed drivers from the HR Function and then, ties in these variables with the desired outcomes from such changes.
Indeed, it can be said that the HR Function can make optimal use of the HR Scorecard to first understand what the management needs from it and then put in place the steps and the procedures to fulfill such expectations and complete the model by tying in the outcomes and the progress made thus far so that there is a Real-Time Dashboard kind of tool that can be used to drive changes, monitor progress, and track them to closure.
Specific Examples
To take an example, supposing a technology or financial services firm aims to double employee productivity through innovation and smart working. To do this, it has to engage with the HR Function about the kind of resources that need to be hired, the type of changes in behavior that are expected from the resources, the measures to count productivity, and the returns on the investment made on the resources by the HR Function in training and development of such resources.
While the HR Function’s role is often limited to the recruitment and training period, it is also the case that the HR Function has a role to play in terms of on the job training as well as for calculating how much such training programs cost and what are the returns on such costs measured as monetary units of increased productivity.
Thus, for all these aspects and initiatives to succeed, the HR Scorecard can help by “keeping score” of the ever-changing dynamics of these interactions between the various organizational managers of teams and the HR Contact person or the People Manager for such teams.
Indeed, given the fact that in this example, productivity increases are sought by hiring resources with demonstrated and demonstrable innovative abilities, the HR Scorecard comes in handy for tracking how much has been spent on such resources and what the returns are on such costs.
Moreover, the senior and the middle managers can also report their budgets and how much they can pay as salary and perks to such resources in the expectation that would deliver the needed outcomes.
Aligning Expectations and Outcomes
Talking about expectations and outcomes, the HR Scorecard is perhaps the most important tool in this respect as far as HR Models and Frameworks are concerned since it provides a basis and a rigorous scientific method of aligning expectations and outcomes.
For each desired outcome, the HR Managers and the Managers of various teams can set expectations and vice versa meaning that they can also specify expectations first and then track the progress towards the outcomes.
In addition, the HR Scorecard also allows the organizations to use data instead of vague qualitative parameters that can be misleading. For instance, if the outcome is a 50% rise in productivity, this data point can be used to track such an outcome against the costs as well as to set expectations from the resources about how they would and should go about to actualize such a productivity increase.
Real-Time Dashboard
As mentioned earlier, another big advantage of the HR Scorecard is that it provides a tool that can be used as a Real-Time Dashboard to monitor and track the progress of the various change initiatives in a data-driven manner. Indeed, as the need might be, quarterly, monthly, and weekly reports can be generated about the progress or otherwise of the change initiatives with the passage of time.
As industry veterans often say, Except for God, Others have to Bring Data to the Table which means that using the HR Scorecard, organizations have an opportunity to use objective and quantifiable measures to track and monitor the progress of organizational change initiatives.
In addition, presenting progress cards and reports to senior manager and executives becomes easier since there are hard numbers that can be used to summarize the progress towards the outcomes that are desired.
