People Operations is so much more than it once was, but this is still a trending fact.

Not all companies have yet caught up to the fact that the employees are a business’ most valuable asset.

 If you are in just such a position, it’s time to take a stand and begin transforming your department into one with the power it needs to make the changes that will greatly increase the capabilities of the company as a whole.

It is time to become proactive and ‘force’ HR – the People function – into a position of importance!

Start with aligning HR’s goals to that of senior management by understanding the needs of the business.

If the CEO wants to increase sales, you need to determine what your team can do to directly influence such a change. Maybe you need to start hiring different kinds of talent. Maybe you need to start learning the (commercial) language of the executives so you can talk to them on their level. Every company is different, so there is no one all-encompassing answer. Even so, with some forethought and planning, it should be relatively easy to see what kind of a contribution HR can make to the betterment of the company.

As you piece together your plan, remember to differentiate and have a firm grasp of what is and what is not HR.

Human Resources is a function/team/department that manages the people. It is not the people, their talent or their skill sets.

By clearly seeing this distinction, you can analyze your own functionality to determine if the department needs to make any changes before adapting itself to a higher level of functionality. Without a smoothly operating machine, the enhanced changes you are hoping to enforce on a company-wide scale will not work and, at worse, make you seem inept!

Your colleagues in Finance and Sales never really have to do much to prove their worth. They handle money and earn money respectively.

HR, on the other hand, is a bit more amorphous.

• Managing talent is great, but what does this do for the bottom line?
• How does it directly correlate to increases and decreases in productivity?

These are all answers you will need to find if you are going to build any form of credibility with management. In addition, always go through with everything you say you are going to implement. Your peers need to know you have the ability to make things happen.

Sadly, it is still so that in many businesses the People function is far from a permanent and respected part of the company, though it is slowly becoming so. To speed this up, every member of the people team must make a stand and take a much more active role in the fate of the company.

Only through integrating itself with the other major teams/function sand players can your team ever hope to achieve what it is suppose to do!

© New To HR