Some CEOs may be clueless, but many are working hand in hand with HR to make businesses better. For evidence that HR is playing a strategic role in organizations, look no further than some of the provocative, challenging questions that CEOs have posed to HR professionals. How would you answer these questions?
- What makes an employee want to stay at our company?
- Can you develop an HR strategy that will get the business from point A to point B?
- If the company were yours, what changes would you make?
- What are you doing to provide value-added services to your internal clients?
- What are the three most important things we could do to improve employee morale?
- How are you going to invest in HR this year so that we have a better HR department than our competitors?
- In the eyes of HR, what should we be doing to improve our marketplace position?
- What can the HR department do to add to the bottom line?
- Five years from now, how will cultural diversity affect our business?
- Which do you consider more important: customers or employees?
- How are you measuring the effectiveness of HR?
- What’s the best change we can make to prepare for the future?
- What do you see as the biggest impediment to our performance?
- How can we reinvest in employees?
- What can the company do to develop and promote women?
Workforce, June 1998, Vol. 77, No. 6, p. 74.