HR's Changing Role in Fueling Business Expansion

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During the COVID-19 pandemic, the role of human resources (HR) has evolved from transactional to strategic – and can be increasingly essential to successful business expansion.

HR can assist business growth in several key ways, including serving as a trusted advisor to senior leadership on workforce issues, modeling efficiency, adaptability, and innovation in operations, and providing a blueprint for managing an organization’s most critical asset – its people. 

What Is HR’s Role? 

The world of business human resources is more complex than ever before. Once a function limited to isolated talent processes like hiring, onboarding, biannual performance management, and compliance, HR’s new seat at the C-suite’s table allows its leaders to implement people-focused strategies that encourage organizational growth. It also means HR professionals at all levels can have broader responsibilities and influence. 

How HR Strategy Can Fuel Your Business 

Although the size of an HR team or department depends on the size of the business, its purpose is multi-faceted and incorporates workforce planning, talent acquisition and management, compensation and benefits, training and upskilling, and workforce safety and compliance. Although small organizations may be new to the world of HR, effective people strategies can be important to expanding a business and understanding the perspective shifts that allow an organization to navigate disruptive change. 

HR Necessities for Business Expansion 

The original role of human resources involved selecting piecemeal programs that weren’t necessarily connected to the rest of the organization or business expansion overall. But after a period of intense transformation, the HR of today is far more sophisticated and requires the following competencies: 

Advisory: During the pandemic, HR professionals became invaluable partners to the C-suite in assessing workforce-related needs and ensuring solid performance during periods of disruption. They also led the charge in helping leaders cope with unprecedented levels of stress and mental health challenges among employees. In the last few years, many HR leaders have gained gradual buy-in for their ideas via an iterative approach that involves multiple conversations and business case refinements over time. 

Efficiency: New people-related issues that crop up during business expansion require an HR group that’s willing to adapt new mindsets, perspectives, and competencies – and especially answer the question, “How can we do better with fewer resources?” HR professionals must continually seek a competitive edge by driving productivity via enhanced employee experiences that are digitized, automated, data-driven, and designed to cut out busywork and administrative load.  

Adaptability: Business expansion requires HR processes that grow with the organization, which means HR staff should be frequently revisiting existing approaches to determine what is working well, what could be improved, and what could be overhauled. By always tying proposed changes back to the goals of the business and creating new strategies that simplify operations, conserve costs, and ensure high quality, an agile HR serves as an indispensable expansion partner. 

Effective people strategies can be important to expanding a business and understanding the perspective shifts that allow an organization to navigate disruptive forces of change.

Creativity and Innovation: As the stewards of human behavior in an organization, HR can play an important role in fostering a culture of psychological safety and risk-taking. A workforce undergoing business expansion should be encouraged to experiment and fail early and often. HR can model this behavior by implementing pilots of new processes and technologies in its own ranks and by collecting pre- and post-benchmarking data to help accurately measure their effectiveness. HR can serve as a leader in selecting innovative projects that map to core business priorities and are adequately resourced for success. 

Change Management: In a time of business expansion, the role of human resources includes helping leaders to dialogue with employees in a sensitive manner. Partnering with an organization’s internal communications team (if there is one), HR can deploy strategies to inform a workforce of upcoming changes, provide appropriate follow up and training, and soliciting and then acting on worker feedback and sentiment. 

Technology Adoption: Historically, the HR profession has been ahead of the curve in terms of using algorithms to prevent unconscious bias and ensure equitable outcomes during the hiring and promotion processes. With the right understanding of available technologies, HR professionals can use automated tools to help make data-informed decisions in nearly every area of people management. Undertaking business expansion at a time of labor shortages, growing organizations can use technology to identify signs of attrition and disengagement and then intervene before the problems become too severe. 

The Path to Growth 

After an initial period of establishment and survival, a business can solidify a path to growth. As businesses expand, they can become an acknowledged player in the market by acquiring new customers and generating profits and will need the expertise of HR to aid in the following: 

• Recruit top talent through targeted sourcing and objective interview and assessment strategies. 
• Create an employee experience that facilitates a strong culture focused on retaining customers and innovating new products and services. 
• Build a scalable organizational structure that can flex as the business continues to grow. 
• Operationalize people-driven processes such as new hire onboarding, performance management, hybrid work, and employee governance. 
• Create a culture of learning that facilitates upskilling and employees’ ability to be redeployed in other functions across the organization.  
• Make appropriate technology investments in areas such as talent acquisition and intelligence, people analytics, and cloud-based self-service that integrate seamlessly with the systems already in place. 
• Form key partnerships with complementary businesses via conference and local event participation.
• Understand the employment implications of expanding both horizontally and vertically and manage associated risks. Ensure compliance with regulations in the jurisdictions where you do business. 

The Takeaway

During the journey from small business to larger player, active participation from HR practitioners can help ensure owners stay true to their purpose and goals – and that business expansion is a positive and worthwhile experience for everyone aboard. 

Photo: Getty Images

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