Fast Growing Organizations Need an HR Business Partner

You've made strategic investments in your sales and marketing capabilities. They are working and now you're rockin' it! Only problem is, you're putting tremendous pressure on your operations and administrative teams.

This is when you need an HR business partner. Not a compliance guru. Not the "Chicken Little" who tells you you can't do that or you'll get sued. Not someone with an HR title, but whose skillset is administrative not strategic. This is when you need someone affiliated with your organization who understands the dynamics of organizational change.

When you're growing quickly you have the option of hiring experienced people away from competitors. They may bring those competitors' cultures with them. And certain aspects of those cultures may clash with the culture you are trying to build. This may not be that big of a problem when you're growing slowly, but when you add several of these folks at one time, it can impact your culture and frustrate your long-time employees.

Perhaps you have an unwritten policy about not hiring people from certain competitors for that very reason. This can be unwise, too, as there may be some potentially good people working at those companies who dislike those competitors' cultures and work practices as much as you do. An HR business partner can help you assess each candidate on his or her own merits, not on a stereotype that might be attached to them due to where they worked previously. And they can help you design on-boarding processes that increase the likelihood that they'll become accepted into the organization and engaged in their new role.

When you're growing quickly, you're tempted to promote people into supervisory roles who may not be well-suited for those roles. The best individual contributor is not always the best supervisor. Often they're not. This decision made hastily can cause all kinds of problems down the road. How can you know if that individual contributor has what it takes to become a supervisor or manager? How do you determine which skills matter at that next level? That's what HR business partners do - help you assess what you have in the organization and what you need.

When you're growing quickly your basic workflows may become strained. This includes how workers report their hours, their in-process and completed work, request time-off, etc. Those processes may have worked just fine when you were 30% smaller, but now the bottlenecks are starting to appear and details are getting missed. HR business partners who have strong business acumen can help design and roll-out systems that make the entire organization more efficient.  

That's just the beginning. An experienced HR business partner can also:

- design performance feedback instruments so that new hires and long-term employees receive timely and relevant feedback, not just design a new form.

- manage employee communication programs so that employees are receiving relevant information about organizational changes in a timely manner.

- give employees the opportunity to be heard either informally or through employee surveys. And they have the courage to say, "we need to fix this" when employees have a legitimate complaint.

If your organization is not large enough to support a full-time, dedicated HR professional with the business acumen to be a legitimate business partner, consider a fractional solution. You can get all the expertise your bigger competitors have, just when you need it and at a level you can afford.