Goals for Human Resources (HR)

It is widely accepted that a company’s most valuable asset is its people. Indeed, without the correct colleagues heading development, manufacturing, sales, management, R&D, HR and other corporate functions it does not matter how good your idea is as nothing will come of it anyway. Clearly, a properly resourced and equipped HR function is crucial in ensuring that all pieces in the puzzle are in place and constantly nurtured as the organisation develops. HR is therefore truly a strategic aspect of all operations and not merely an administrative function, as it has been regarded historically.

Building a full-fledged organisation capable of taking your business to the next level takes time and significant effort. Not only do you need to find the right people across all levels, but you also need to make them stay for the long term to ensure everyone becomes fully ingrained in the organisation to be able to contribute with their full range of skills and ideas.

So how do you make people stay? Clearly there is no single right answer here, but a key component is establishing a deep sense of loyalty and trust between all employees and the organisation. To do that, it is key that staff are not regarded as numbers or anonymous units that perform tasks, but as real people. Real people require relevant things to do, and to feel motivated by the organisation’s mission and vision in order to thrive. And if everyone in your organisation thrives, they will feel fully engaged, create magic and share a deep sense of pride of the results achieved.

To earn the trust and loyalty of employees , the organisation needs to recognise that each person is constantly developing, and that most of us therefore need to feel that the organisation invests in our continuous evolution through training, involvement to new, exciting and challenging tasks and exposure to what’s around the corner for us when we reach the next level. This is a big ask for all organisations, and HR is placed firmly in the forefront of this workstream. To be able to truly empower individual development, HR needs to have the proper mandate and budget to carry out these initiatives, and it is important that they make it their objective to always keep the organisation as powerful as possible by strengthening each person’s development and capacity to become a unique internal building block. As an organisation develops, HR will naturally also need to recruit further resource to fill new roles, but hiring should always be made with a long-term perspective and the ambition to continue building the new colleagues skills, and therefore value-add, over time.