In October of 2012 KPMG published a study of 400 C-Suite executives. As you can tell from the title of this post, the news was not good. They think HR is ineffective. How do we get beyond that? Here are three suggestions to improve the performance of your HR department.

3 Things to do to Improve the Performance of your HR Department

According to one quote HR departments “consistently fail to demonstrate any form of value to their organisation”. (This is their UK spelling). The report is called “Rethinking HR for a Changing World” and is based on a survey of C-suite executives. The study was not all doom and gloom, 17% of the executives thought their HR departments do a good job. But as far as the others were concerned HR is just not up to the challenge of ushering their companies through an increasingly virtual and flexible workplace.

While HR continues to make inroads in areas such as social media and analytics it is not perceived as being enough. According to the study only 15% of respondents regard HR as capable of providing “insightful and predictive” workforce information. In an ultimate understatement Robert Bolton of KPMG said that HR has a “perception problem.”

Three Things

Given that point of view of C-suite executives what are some of the things an HR department can do to improve?

· Acquire data analysis skills. If you don’t have the ability yourself hire someone well versed in statistics and analysis. This may mean you go outside of the traditional areas of finding someone for the HR department. This person does not need HR skills. It may take a selling job on your part to convince someone with this skill set that they want to be in the HR department. Perhaps create the position of HR Analyst.

· Collect that data. That means you have to have some way of quantifying things that often are not quantified. Do you do performance evaluation? Do you capture all that information? Is it tied to actual performance numbers? Is it tied back to sources of the candidates or training they have had or pay? You need to figure out how to put all that stuff together. By the way, the data collected needs to be relevant to the performance of the company, which means you have to know the business. Most CEOs don’t care about internal HR metrics.

· Use technology to a much greater extent, including social media. There are still too many HR people who avoid social media use inside their organizations and outside. The get all frightened by listening to lawyers tell them the downside of social media use and thus decide it is just better to avoid it. GET OVER IT! It is not going away. It is a superb method of communication and information and data collection.

Wouldn’t It Be Nice?

Wouldn’t it be nice to read a C-suite survey in a couple of years where only 17% of executives thought HR was doing a bad job?

The key thing to me is understanding what the executives want. What things do they consider to be of value to the organization? Find the answer to that question and then deliver and you will make the grade.