What difference could commercial HR make to a business?

One of our Regional Directors, Jo Ramsdale, explains why commercial HR is so crucial in a growing business.

Jo: Commercial HR means that you business partner with every part of the organisation. For example, commercial HR would work with an operations team, to look at the methods and ways of working to see if there was a better way of doing so. Which meant that people were either structured in different ways or that roles were more clearly defined, that people understood more clearly what was expected of them, had appropriate key performance indicators, objectives and targets that allowed them to perform at their optimum. Equally people would be measured in a way which was fair and equitable and help them to feel engaged with the organisation.

People think that HR is just handbooks and contracts, but HR isn’t about that at all, that’s just one tiny element of the whole HR offering. What HR’s really about is adding value across the whole of the human resource within an organisation. 70% of an organisations cost is people, yet most organisations don’t have a people expert. In fact, in the SME space HR is commonly the last thing they think about, despite people being their largest cost.

In my world, I would be looking at having a people expert in an organisation much earlier on than most SMEs do. If they did that, what they would find is that when they reach a critical size of 40-60 employees they would be in a much better place to deliver their objectives and goals. Rather than at that point trying to call in an HR expert to help them figure out the next steps.