Study Shows Human Resource Management Departments (HRM) Need to Go Fast to Improve Business

Nov. 10, 2010 - PRLog -- Los Angeles, CA – Ask employees if they think their HR department is slow or fast, and this will lead to a pretty interesting conversation. That’s just what eePulse, www.eepulse.com, and CEO at the University of Southern California did in the Fall 2010 Leadership Pulse. The leadership pulse asked leaders to rate overall, leadership confidence and the speed and accuracy of their HR function.

The Leadership Pulse
The Leadership Pulse is an ongoing, learning initiative that focuses manager dialogue on current business-metrics. In fall 2010, 677 people were asked about leadership confidence and Fast HRM. Respondents included a broad representation of executives around the world from multiple job disciplines, levels and industries.

When the data on speed and accuracy were combined with the confidence and firm-performance data, the findings were:

• Confidence and firm performance levels were highest when HRM was fast and accurate.

•   Confidence scores were higher when HR was fast and inaccurate (3.67) than when HR was slow and accurate (3.59).

•   Confidence scores were based on a 1 to 5 scale, where 5 is very confident and 1 is not at all confident.  

• If there is a choice between speed and accuracy, fast HRM wins.  

“Contrary to what you might think, some of the biggest proponents of HR speeding up were in HR,” states Theresa Welbourne, Ph.D., eePulse Founder, President, and CEO and Research Professor with the Center for Effective Organizations, University of Southern California. “In fact, the HR subsample’s highest confidence scores overall were associated with fast and inaccurate HR. In open-ended comments, the respondents asked that HR speed up hiring, performance management, HR metrics work, learning and development, employee engagement and more. You name it, and the respondents wanted to speed it up,” states Welbourne. “We find that managers and leaders are all speeding up their own work, and if HR slows them down, they get quite irritated. HR needs to take a step back and focus on what’s needed for the business vs. what’s best and biggest and perhaps most popular in HRM. The teams at CEO and eePulse are working to help HR learn to focus and streamline the work and still maintain the accuracy required.”  

In order to help HR departments go faster and deliver on what their organizations need, Dr. Welbourne and her team are providing workshops and tools on Fast HRM. This body of work uses methodologies from agile and extreme programming to help change how HR work is being done.

“We are seeing significant success in changing how HR is being delivered, and our goal is to make sure that HR is a true contributor to agile organizations vs. an obstacle,” states Welbourne. To learn more, a presentation and audio from a recent webinar on the results are available at http://ceo.usc.edu/news/webinar_fast_hrm_and_leadershi.html. Or, go to www.eepulse.com and read recent articles about Fast HRM.  

About eePulse, Inc.
eePulse™ is a human resource management (HRM) and leadership consulting firm with proprietary technology that helps improve firm performance through human and relational capital. Go to www.eepulse.com to learn more. Call 1-877-377-8573 or write to info@eepulse.com for papers and other resources.  

About Leadership Pulse
The Leadership Pulse is the first and only real-time learning and human capital benchmarking process. With free and paid memberships, anyone who manages people or projects can start learning immediately. Go to www.leadershippulse.com to sign up or to learn more.  

The Center for Effective Organizations (CEO)
CEO combines action research and action learning to help organizations become more effective at taking actions that drive measurable, business results. Their team of world-renowned researchers helps organizations around the globe become more effective through data-driven learning. See http://ceo.usc.edu to learn more.  

Media Contact: Melanie Rembrandt, Rembrandt Communications®, melanie@eepulse.com, 800-PR1-0116

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eePulse™ is a human resource management (HRM) and leadership consulting and software firm in the business of transforming traditionally slow HR tools and processes into fast, high impact systems. Visit www.eepulse.com or call 877-377-8573 for more info.