HR at Your Service: Lessons from Benchmark Service Organizations - Softcover

Ford, Robert C.; Latham, Gary P.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1586442473 ISBN 13: 9781586442477

Verlag: Society for Human Resource Management, 2012

Inhaltsangabe

Focusing on the day-to-day delivery of quality service that can drive a successful partnership between the Human Resources (HR) department and the rest of the company, this handbook demonstrates how HR managers can and must ensure that their teams develop the ability to anticipate and attend to the needs, wants, and expectations of managers and their employees. As it provides practical tools and guidance on building world-class HR departments, this guide aids HR leaders to plan for future client needs, conduct internal audits, and hire as well as reward customer-centric individuals.  Lessons learned from thriving businesses, such as Walt Disney Co., Marriott International Inc., and Darden’s restaurants, are also applied and explained in the HR context.  

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Gary P. Latham is Secretary of State Professor of Organizational Behaviour in the Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto. He is also the author of several books, including Becoming the Evidence-Based Manager: Making the Science of Management Work for You. Robert C. Ford is a professor of management in the College of Business Administration at the University of Central Florida. He is the author of several books, including Managing the Guest Experience in Hospitality. He lives in Orlando, Florida.

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HR at Your Service

Lessons from Benchmark Service Organizations

By Gary P. Latham

Society For Human Resource Management

Copyright © 2012 Gary P. Latham and Robert C. Ford
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-1-58644-247-7

Contents

Title Page, 
Copyright Page, 
Foreword, 
Acknowledgements, 
Chapter 1. - Client-Centric Strategy: A Blueprint for Human Resource Managers, 
Chapter 2. - Providing Client-Centric Service: Delivering Quality Clients Value, 
Chapter 3. - Planning to Meet Client Expectations, 
Chapter 4. - Creating and Leading a Client-Centric Culture, 
Chapter 5. - Client-Centric Staffing & Training, 
Chapter 6. - Motivating and Empowering Client-Centric Service, 
Chapter 7. - Information Systems: Communicating Client-Centric Service, 
Chapter 8. - Service Delivery Systems: Ensuring Client-Centric Service, 
Chapter 9. - Becoming a Valued Member of the Senior Management Team, 
Chapter 10. - Sustaining HR's Value to the Top Management Team: HR Managers as Service, 
Leaders, 
Endnotes, 
Additional SHRM-Published Books, 

CHAPTER 1

Client-Centric Strategy: A Blueprint for Human Resource Managers

"Give the people everything you can give them."

—Walt Disney, founder, Walt Disney Company

Researchers who study human resource management have documented that HR practices are leading indicators of a firm's financial performance. Yet, many human resource departments are frustrated by the lack of recognition and appreciation they receive for the contributions made to their organization's effectiveness. Further, HR managers have long wondered how they can offer input into crucial decisions and demonstrate how the services they provide can contribute to the organization's overall effectiveness, efficiency, and return on investment (ROI). They long for the opportunity to lead the future thinking on HR management in their organizations instead of defending the value they add from constant cost-cutting initiatives led by those who will not or cannot see what HR contributes to organizational success. The key to gaining participation and defending the value of HR's contributions lies in taking a client-centric approach to delivering HR's services.

Fortunately, the service/hospitality industry provides a blueprint for how HR can remodel itself into a service-oriented department focused on the needs of the managers and employees it serves. Fundamentally, HR is a service department within the organization in which it operates. As such, there are lessons it can learn from benchmark service organizations such as the Walt Disney Co., hotelier Marriott International Inc., Darden's restaurants, and USAA, a provider of financial services to members of the armed forces and their families, among others. Service industry strategies applied by HR managers can transform an HR department by improving its perception by the organization's managers as a department of value-adding leaders, increasing the importance of its voice in the C-suite, and broadening appreciation for and recognition of its invaluable contributions to an organization's success.

Client-centric HR service, informed by the lessons learned in the service industry, provides a straightforward path to improving HR's ability to contribute to an organization's success and to that of its units. Client-centric service is based on two simple steps practiced by successful benchmark service organizations. First, find out what managers and their employees need, want, and expect to be successful, and establish what they are capable of doing. Second, endeavor to meet or exceed their needs, wants, and expectations while enhancing their capabilities.

Although these steps sound simple to do, they are admittedly hard work. Doing what you want to do and know how to do is much easier than asking or studying clients to find out what they really need in order for them to be effective. It is always tempting to take time to solve HR's problems rather than the problems within other departments. That is the traditional way things get done in nonservice organizations, and it is wrong. What HR can learn from Disney, Marriott, Darden, USAA, and many other outstanding service organizations highlighted throughout this book is to find out from clients what is important, valued, and useful — and then act on that knowledge. These service organizations offer HR clear lessons on how to learn from its clients in order to identify, design, and deliver what they truly want, need, and expect human resources to do to find and help solve organizational problems and improve everyone's performance.

The first cardinal lesson to be learned from the service industry is to always start with the customer. Disney invented the term "guestology" to emphasize the company's commitment to its customers, defining it as "the scientific study of a guest's needs, wants, and behaviors." The way for an HR manager to become a respected, recognized leader in the workplace is to do the same for managers and employees: study the client's needs, wants, and behaviors. The opposite approach is patiently sitting in an office and smiling pleasantly when someone asks an HR-related question or requests an HR service. Service is different than servitude, and the best client-centric service is not passive but proactive. HR must seek out how it can co-create solutions with all parts of the organization, even when other departments do not know how to articulate their HR needs. Regardless of what else you do as an HR manager, systematically discovering what the organization's managers and their employees need to be effective is critical to your department's ability to deliver service. When you know what your clients need, you can manage everything and everyone in your department to fulfill those expectations.

The typical human resource management (HRM) graduate-level curriculum emphasizes strategic planning, staffing, performance management, training, labor economics, industrial relations, organizational behavior, legal compliance, compensation plans, information systems, fringe benefits, and the like. What is missing in these academic programs is how to manage human resources in such a way that HR managers will be viewed by everyone else in the organization as "client-centric" enablers rather than as "watchdog" bureaucrats.

The purpose of this book is to explain ways that you — as an HR manager — can ensure that your team develops a strong appreciation for the power of anticipating and attending to the needs, wants, and expectations of managers and their employees first and foremost. Unfortunately, many HR departments lack knowledge of techniques for providing clients with true client-centric service. This lack of knowledge explains the failure of many HR departments in providing value-added services to help managers achieve their respective goals and the mission of the entire organization. Saying "we serve our clients" is one thing, but as you will soon see, benchmark service organizations make this commitment real in everything they say and do. Service-oriented HR departments know what makes them valuable in the eyes of all other managers and their employees. They take the time to learn what their clients need, want, and expect from them in order for their clients to be successful. They then demonstrate that their solutions to HR challenges are cost-effective, making HR's service meaningful and memorable. Knowing the behavior and actions that make a service encounter with HR memorable for a manager...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Society for Human Resource Management
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2012
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 1586442473
• ISBN 13: 9781586442477
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 194
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: SHRM; https://www.shrm.org/; ; 1800 Duke Street; Alexandria; VA; 22314; USA
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar