How to Create Market-Based HR

Based upon interviews with SYSCO executives and HR professionals, here aresome of the principals that shape the company’s innovative approach to HR.

• Run HR like an entrepreneurial business. Think of a company’svarious departments, both management and the employees, as customers, ratherthan colleagues.

• Freedom of choice. Give your company’s departments a choice of whatservices they want to buy, rather than forcing them to accept what you thinkthey need. The end result will be a clientele that’s honestly invested in anHR initiative’s success.

• Information is your hottest-selling product. Corporate customerswant to know how well they’re performing in comparison with otherdepartments, and how to improve that performance. Focus on collecting thedata that they want and need.

• Analyze the winners, and figure out what works for them. It’s notenough to theorize about what practices will improve employee satisfactionand economic performance. You need to study the best performers in yourcompany — preferably the ones who’ve made recent, dramatic improvement invarious areas — and identify the specific management practices that werecrucial to the success. Once you’ve got those success genes mapped, it’s fareasier to clone them.

• Quantify success. Your company’s managers are driven by bottom-lineresults. The more that you can quantify the effect of HR initiatives ontheir profits, the more likely you are to gain their cooperation.

Workforce, March 2002, p. 33 — Subscribe Now!