This gives you generally two options to structure your burgeoning HR department. Hire an HR assistant. In this scenario, you become the head of HR to handle strategic needs, such as employee relations and performance management. The newly hired HR assistant handles administrative tasks like managing the HRIS, filing paperwork and posting job ads.
Mikaela Kiner believes that this structure could boost your efficiency. An HR assistant would allow the manager to offload some of the administrative work. This way, the manager would focus only on strategic efforts and not waste up to 50 percent of their time on repetitive tasks. Hire a full-time recruiter. This person will take charge of one of the most taxing HR functions: Peter Rosen recommends this structure to save tons of time by using a specialist for recruiting.
After all, recruiting requires specialization to hire lots of at a fast pace during the growth stages. When room opens up for your third employee, hire an assistant or a recruiter, depending on your remaining need. This structure is recommended for most companies. Many organizations bring in culture and leadership development experts when they reach employees because these are vital focus areas.
As you grow your HR department, you should hire specialists to own specific HR functions such as benefits or employee relations. These functions will become more complicated with size.
Our experts differ on this. Rosen says you can outsource compensation occasionally to build competitive salary structures and benefits packages. Kiner is for hiring an internal compensation expert early on who can also own your HR software systems. A lot of times you have compensation and benefits people who are often good with [HR] systems, and you can put that all under one person.
Company Growing? How to Plan Your HR Department Structure
Once you have compensation covered, your needs may vary by industry. Here is an example of what a six person HR department might look like:. Handles the strategic vision of the department and approves all high-level decisions while handling communications with C-suite. Works with hiring managers to create job listings, parse through resumes, conduct interviews and extend offers while managing the applicant tracking system ATS.
Handles onboarding needs, coordinates performance management efforts and manages employee disputes while recommending policy changes for approval. Develops competitive pay and compensation structures within predetermined budgets, manages core HR software systems and ensures error-free payroll runs and benefits administration.
Works with department managers to develop effective training courses that enhance skills, creates materials and assessments and manages any learning management platforms. Managers tend to batch feedback, both negative and positive, into the annual feedback dump, depriving employees of the timely feedback they need to actually improve when it matters; and employees are nervous about their appraisal as it affects their upcoming compensation and promotional chances. This means many companies excel at calculating ratings.
But it comes at a high cost to the morale and motivation of people. However, the tides are shifting, and organizations of all shapes and sizes are already eliminating employee appraisals in order to respond to the challenges and interfaces to HR instruments.
Bringing People Operations into the 21st Century with Lean-Agile Values and Principles
Figure 4 demonstrates the facts and trend of traditional performance management systems [3]. This challenges HR to push the reset button on performance management on all levels. Here is how SAFe can help re-optimize the system for performance flow:. SAFe shifts from month cycles to an iterative, interactive process measured in weeks and PI Plannings. These iterations reflect an optimal cadence and represent the new performance cycles. Utilize PI planning to share the vision, set inspiring goals, and clarify expectations — Being able to inspire people is imperative.
All members of the train come together to understand the business context and vision, set and synchronize goals, clarify expectations and dependencies, and commit to common objectives. This replaces static individual goals with verifiable collaborative objectives. Continuously inspect and adapt — Agile ceremonies like Iteration Reviews and Iteration Retrospectives are all about inspecting and adapting. While iterations focus on the system under development, not the people, they do provide formal and informal opportunities in team retrospectives each iteration and Inspect and Adapt program retrospectives to provide feedback on individual and team performance.
The focus is, hence, no longer on assessing individual goals, but on continuous improvement — not only on a personal but also on a program enterprise level something neglected in traditional performance appraisals. Embed learning and development into the workflow — Companies must constantly evolve, and Agile ways of working are all about learning. This gives people the time and space to improve and innovate at their own pace. Cross-role, cross-functional, and cross-team training further enhance the skills, flexibility, and utility of the knowledge worker.
These mechanisms support the particular need of the knowledge worker and help the enterprise fulfill its responsibility to create a workflow that allows for active learning and growth.
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Eliminate annual performance ratings in favor of continuous feedback — Instead of employee ratings, Agile organizations shape a culture of mutual respect where candid dialogues and continuous feedback consistently take place between leaders, employees, and peers. This focus on relentless improvement is a key part in embracing agility and achieving its full impact. It also fundamentally increases the intensity and quality of discussions on personal accomplishments and growth potentials. These new ways of working fulfill the original goals of performance management far better than any annual performance rating.
And by bringing a Lean-Agile mindset to all HR practices, people operations continuously engages, interacts, grows and recognizes talents — without the need for an employee appraisal to act as a trigger. Thus, making annual ratings and forced rankings obsolete in an agile world. Performance flow in Agile enterprises is all about optimal cadence, responsiveness, and growth — not about monetary incentives. The industrial era belief that money is the strongest and only effective motivator for employees is firmly rooted in many organizations.
Unsurprisingly, compensation and cash bonuses are still used as a predominant way to incentivize and recognize people — an expensive and ineffective approach for knowledge workers.
How to Structure Your HR Department As Your Company Grows
Agile people are driven by mastery, autonomy, and purpose. Meaningful reward and recognition for them come in forms of pride in achievement, social contacts, interesting work, new challenges, growth opportunities, and self-fulfillment. The way to take the topic of money off the table is by paying employees fairly and competitively, but also by having open and honest communication about pay, and by making matching compensation with adequate reward and recognition.
Any job is consequently less stringent and instead, requires a high degree of flexibility and ability to activate and apply relevant knowledge. Once a knowledge worker accepts that they are fairly and competitively compensated, they are free to focus on the work, not the money. This means empowering managers to set salaries and pay increases.
These adjustments must be decoupled from an annual process. This allows for a more flexible schedule and helps separate the concern of compensation from performance feedback. Leaders are guided in their decision by peer reviews, transparency, as well as adequate data and expert advice, provided by a dedicated Reward Solution team as requested. Indeed, many valuable knowledge workers are poor salary negotiators.
In its place, they must feel that they are not disadvantaged by those who lobby more vociferously for money. However, any company needs to evaluate and test carefully what degree of transparency is feasible in their environment. They set individual against individual and team against team.
They should be eliminated entirely.
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However, fair, transparent incentives that honor collective performance and corporate success for example, equity and profit sharing plans , allow employees to participate financially in the success of the enterprise and thereby feel they are fairly and justly treated for enterprise success. Each enterprise must find a suitable combination of low frequency formal, recognition with more frequent and intimate, personal acknowledgments. Figure 5 represents an example of a diversified recognition program [4]. Flexible schedules, remote office, parental leave, financial guidance, time off, and volunteer opportunities are examples of tangible benefits that help people find their optimal, work-life balance.
Investments in the well-being of employees are not only the right thing to do but translate directly into revenue. Learning and growth have always been intertwined. But it takes on a completely new dynamic in a world of accelerating change, wherever shorter half-life of facts and knowledge is a reality.
Create a learning organization — While working is a key part of learning, agile people must also understand how knowledge grows, changes, and is overturned; and be given a method to acquire relevant new skills and competencies as well as the ability for transfer of learning. Empower employees to take the lead — In line with new talent contract, employees are not only empowered when it comes to their work, but they are also in charge of their own development. They access knowledge, attend learning sessions, build a network, and shape their progress and career path according to their own needs and perceptions.
This journey is strongly guided — but not driven or controlled — by people operations and Lean-Agile Leaders. Illustrate prospective role-based career paths — Modern careers are more about personal choices and meaningful growth than climbing a fast disappearing hierarchical ladder. Consequently, career paths are becoming more fluid, multifaceted, and individualized than ever before. A catalog of prospective role-based career paths can illustrate typical growth paths, but without limiting the options to a pre-set career model.
Figure 6 presents an example of such a role-based career path [5]. Establish individual career coaching — A dedicated team of career coaches can connect with each person individually in order to outline an individual career profile with a learning and growth plan, that is continuously reviewed and adjusted as needed.
This ensures that boosting the internal market value of people is always in focus, but it also equips the organization with a previously untapped understanding of their talent pipeline. HR no longer depends on a rating from an annual appraisal, because they know their people on a personal, authentic level. People operations must understand the organization and its changing needs and be able to match that with the circumstances and aspirations of people positively. They engage in continuous listening, communication, and feedback in order to identify development areas and boost learning.
These constant interactions are crucial to the success of both: While it opens up an attractive world of growth opportunities, it also boosts skill sharing and knowledge transfer across the enterprise. It is the aligned and combined effort of employees, leaders, and HR that enables the organization to become a learning network with an unbeatable talent pool — the foundation of a resilient Lean-Agile Enterprise. The face of organizations is changing fast — and drastically. Lean-Agile development with SAFe reinvents the way we work and helps us build an engaged, talented, and vigorous workforce.
It a valuable stepping stone to guide your HR into the 21st Century. Reach out to your HR organization and invite them to SAFe training, ceremonies, and learning sessions; and support them in bringing a Lean-Agile mindset to their People approach. What's new in SAFe 4. DevOps and Release on Demand. Business Solutions and Lean Systems Engineering. Introduction The digital transformation is affecting virtually every enterprise across the globe.
Principle 8 — Unlock the intrinsic motivation of knowledge workers Principle 9 — Decentralize Decision-Making This, inevitably, also affects the way HR interacts and engages with both management and the workforce. When it comes to Talent Acquisition, Agile Enterprises get a competitive edge by considering the following: Employee Appraisals This challenges HR to push the reset button on performance management on all levels.