2000 Vision Optimas Award Profile GTE

GTE

Real HR: To help keep competitive, GTE worked to integrate its HR strategies with overall business objectives. The goal, simply, was to make sure that HR was helping move the business forward.

To do that, HR efforts were focused on five key areas: managing talent, developing world-class leadership, customer service and support, organizational integration, and HR capabilities.

Although the concept sounds good, HR further challenged itself to find a way to measure the effectiveness of its efforts.

Real Impact: The result is the GTE HR Balanced Scorecard. The scorecard was developed to assess whether HR strategies were actually being implemented and, if so, whether they were helping the business.

The scorecard is unusual in that reports on both leading and lagging indicators, and it is the first to be used with such depth throughout an HR organization. The scorecard captures more than 700 metrics in three categories: volume and activity of the HR function, service level measures and strategic measures.

The results are shared throughout the organization. A pay for performance plan for HR professionals has been tied to the metrics. The scorecard helps HR to identify issues before they become problems. It also has helped boost HR’s credibility.

But the greatest benefit may be that it has helped change the GTE culture from one in which each function worked in a silo to one in which information is shared across functions to improve productivity.