Are You Building Relationships in Your HR Role?

If not…you better start!

If you are in a human resources role – whether an administrator, training specialist, manager, director or in a senior leadership human resources position – and you are not investing the time each week to build relationships throughout the organization, you cannot be successful over the long term.

Human resources is tasked with ensuring that employees have what is needed in order to help the organization meet their long-term goals. This includes having the skills and knowledge needed and feeling “cared for” by the organization. Human resources also ensures that the organization has the right mix of people in order to ensure the organization is successful through hiring and developing the best talent for the job. And, human resources is often the main point of contact for employees when the organization is going through any change.  All of this requires strong relationships throughout the organization.

Strong working relationships between human resources and the employees within the organization enables for a variety of benefits, including:

• Building trust in the organization’s leadership
• Enabling for support around change initiatives
• Enabling for human resources to launch key initiatives of their own
• Enabling for securing and retaining the best talent
• Collaboration and communication between and among departments and divisions
• Cross-functional support for major initiatives
• Enabling for better integration of organizations during mergers and acquisitions

Building relationships does not have to take up significant time – therefore there is no excuse for not investing time on a weekly basis to build relationships. No matter how busy you are, you must take the time to build relationships between Human Resources and the employees within the organization. Any of the following are great (and easy!) ways to build relationships:

• Attend department meetings to understand the challenges within that department and the successes that department and its employees have realized

This enables you to better map initiatives to meet the challenges of specific departments, enabling for quicker buy-in to ensure a successful initiative.

• Host “lunch & learn” sessions on a monthly or bi-monthly basis with Human Resources

This enables you to introduce upcoming initiatives to employees throughout the organization and to share with employees what is happening organization-wide.

• Facilitate sharing of information via a collaboration portal (internal site)

A collaboration portal enables employees to have one location online where they can learn about initiatives organization-wide, upcoming training programs or workshops in which they can participate, information about employee benefits and otherwise interact with Human Resources via an online forum. A portal enables for knowledge sharing throughout the organization.

• Human resources newsletter

Consider a quarterly newsletter (or possibly bi-monthly in organizations that have much going on) to share news about the company from a Human Resources perspective.)

• Have lunch with peers on a monthly basis, or meet for coffee with your peers.

This enables for building stronger personal relationships throughout the organization and for sharing of information. Similar to attending department meetings, you learn about others’ challenges which enables you to align upcoming projects to how those challenges may be solved. When we can do that successfully, we increase the commitment and support for our human resource initiatives.

Similar to how you schedule meetings and projects in your calendar, go ahead and schedule time to build relationships. This ensures you will invest the time needed and it won’t get pushed aside for other work to be done. Remember – building relationships is as much a part of your role in Human Resources as is all the other responsibilities in your job description.