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Is HR Just Your Corporate Cop? There Are Ways to Get Your Operations People and HR Working Together as Partners. By Steve Schumacher Several years ago, I started working with a company that had eight dif‐ ferent operations throughout the country, a couple of regional offices and a corporate office. I traveled around to the different sites, interviewed employees, did surveys and did an overall diagnosis of the company. One of the ques‐ tions I asked was, "How often does Human Resources (HR) visit and what do they do when they visit?" The common responses were: ■ They never come here unless someone's getting fired. ■ We only see them when it's union contract time. ■ Nobody likes it when they visit; they only tell us what to do and never ask us what we need. ■ They usually meet with the managers then leave, and I don't even know their names. After collecting all of this informa‐ tion, I then went to the vice presi‐ dent of HR and asked him how often he and his staff get out to the differ‐ ent locations and what do they do on‐site. He was very quick to tell me that his staff spends probably 80 percent of its time out in the field meeting with employees, hearing their concerns and building relationships with all of the operations people. It was shock‐ ing to see the completely different perceptions between what he said his staff did and what the company employees perceived. Too often, HR is perceived as corpo‐ 32 ROCKproducts • OCTOBER 2011 rate staff that knows nothing about operations and fills the primary role of keeping the company out of legal difficulties. Most of the HR people I have worked with over the years have a lot more to offer than that. There are some spe‐ cific things you can do to build a work‐ ing partnership between your HR staff and operations staff. 1. Work on your half of the relationship. If you find that the HR staff are not being proactive and reaching out to you, take the initiative and reach out to them. Get to know them as peo‐ ple. Extend invitations to them to come visit your operations. Take them out to lunch with you and your staff. Make them feel welcome. Operations can be a bit intimidating to corporate staff at times. After all, you are the money makers. Corpo‐ rate staff spends the money. 2. Be careful how you speak about HR staff. Pay attention to the things you say to your employees about HR staff. If you are consistently running them down in front of others, other em‐ ployees will not look highly upon them nor welcome them when they come to your plant. You are all on one team with a single mission. That team is made up of everyone, not just operations. Speak highly of the HR team, talk of them as a resource for everyone to benefit from. 3. Survey your employees. Initiate a survey of how HR serves your employees. Work with HR on Steve Schumacher is a management con- sultant, trainer and public speaker with more than 25 years of experience in nu- merous industries throughout North America, including aggregates opera- tions. He can be reached at sschuma@gmail.com. the areas they feel like they should be working on with your employees. Build some open‐ended questions and make the surveys anonymous. The HR folks I've met want to im‐ prove their services to employees. By establishing a baseline of how HR is currently perceived, it gives them a starting point to build from. 4. Put together "wish lists." Meet with your employees and de‐ velop lists of what you would like to see your HR team provide Think of yourselves as customers of the HR staff and you are going to let them know how best to meet your needs. Put them in order of priority so the HR team knows what the main things are that you want and need. Of course, simply because you put it down doesn't mean it can hap‐ pen right away. We all know about www.rockproducts.com