A colleague, Laura Schroeder, who has an eye for the interesting and important pointed me to this article some time ago that qualifies as both: “Finance Keener on HR strategy than HR.” The gist:
“According to a report by global employee health solutions firm Vielife and London South Bank University (LSBU), financial directors showed a greater belief that employment matters, in general, have an impact on future organisational performance than their HR counterparts.” |
Why financial professionals are reportedly ahead of human resources pros in understanding the connection between people and business performance could be an interesting analysis in itself. I can see a number of good reasons why finance “gets” strategic human capital management and I think there are some important implications:
The leading implication of all this is that strategic HR concepts and ideas are crucial to business success today. The finance departments that are aligned with the above reasons have undertaken the transformation necessary to become strategic business partners. We see it with our own customers: As Workday announced today, Sallie Mae selected Workday Financial Management and HCM because it understands the correlation between HR and finance and the value of a unified platform, and it required tools that will allow it to get real-time information about its workforce that impacts critical management decisions.
Many, many more finance departments are either in process of or have yet to begin the transformation journey. So we, as a finance profession and discipline, need to continue to invest in talent and systems capable of improving our ability to understand and measure the investment in and contributions of human capital.
For HR, there is an incredible opportunity to deliver business value (who better to drive strategic HR initiatives?), but to do this HR must continue to evolve, as has finance, from an administrative focus to a business focus. In short, successful HR people of the future will be business people, and effective HR systems will be business systems.
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