Last week, I was catching up with a former colleague who works in a thinly-stretched Human Resources department. She was telling me that her days are scattered with questions like “We need this candidate, report, etc., ASAP!”, or “I can’t stand working with John, can we fire him?”, and of course, “I have a question about this line on my paycheck…”. While she has strategic goals and projects on her plate, such as developing Competencies, she has trouble finding time to work on them because of the day-to-day interruptions. My former colleague wants to be an HR “superhero”, but ends up needing to push off her strategic work until she has “more time”. Unfortunately for her, and most HR people that I speak with, there is never more time.
Reflecting on her work, she shared her ideas of how she could have pushed the organization forward in the past year. She could have saved the organization both time and money through selection and development projects that she already knows her company needs. However, before she could get to more strategic changes, she would get bogged down in day-to-day competing priorities, such as corporate objectives, regional objectives, and HR questions.
We’ve all had the experience that as one crisis or project is coming to a close, there’s always a couple more cropping up. As a result, the good ideas, the long-term project, or the employees’ developmental needs sometimes get pushed to the back burner, or are jammed into a one-day meeting. My friend loves working at an agile and hard-driving company, but she confided that she rarely has the ability to sit down and focus on projects due to her workload. As with most of us, she has to do more than ever but with less support, and is already working 10+ hour days and on her Blackberry after work.
How do you balance your workload? One of the things that ECI specializes in is doing the “heavy lifting” on Talent Management projects and initiatives. By developing flexible/custom Talent Management tools and systems, we allow our clients to manage their day-to-day responsibilities, while we work on projects in the background. This allows for a best-of-both-worlds scenario, where our clients can make an impact with new Talent Management strategies, while still managing the everyday priorities.
