HR departments are commonly perceived as a cost to the company, but rarely as a source for profit.
The issue might not be in the inherent functions of HR, but rather in the incapability of HR functions to demonstrate “a measurable impact on corporate productivity or profitability by design.”
Eventually good and bad employees come and go. No matter how great your company is, people will leave at some point. Employee turnover is inevitable, and it’s accompanied by costs due to the person leaving, the need for replacing the worker, training, productivity lost in the interim period, and other.
According to Lola Kakes of Effortless HR, there are two main groups into which the costs can be placed: hard costs and soft costs. The hard costs that can be easily identified are:
Organizations can leverage their social network, which stems from its own workforce, in order to optimize its performance. Benefits can be seen in the organizational structure, in product innovation, production improvement, or individual employee performance.
Social networks can also “help an organization leverage the entire workforce to market new products, find new sales leads, or find top performers by using existing social networks such as LinkedIn and Facebook.” This according to Yves Lermusi, founder of reference check company Checkster.
Competency modeling (or developing success profiles) implies determining the specific competencies required for high performance in a specific job.
The effort of developing these competency models can go to waste if the results are not properly implemented in the organization.
Knowledge management has been around for ages and recently, organizations have found ways to implement successful KM programs to benefit from the practice.
Even as there is no universal definition of knowledge management, we could describe it as the collection of processes that govern the creation, dissemination, and utilization of knowledge within an organization.
This is a process that creates value through the aggregation and utilization of intellectual and knowledge-based assets.
From the definition it might not sound so concrete, but there are actual ways of developing and implementing KM programs that can allow the company to get the best out of the practice.
However, knowledge management presents several challenges. CIO.com outlines the following: