The HR Awards that forgot to mention HR!

I went to some fabulous HR awards a couple of weeks ago. The thing is – they forgot to mention HR!

There were awards for Overall Business Excellence and as well as Excellence in:

• Marketing
• Customer Service
• Strategy and Planning
• Exporting
• Innovation

The CEO of every winning business who came up – talked about how the only way they could have made their company so successful and achieved what they have is with the fantastic people that they have. Many of them talked about focusing on building the right culture, finding people who had the right team fit and giving people scope to grow and use their skills.

The words ‘HR’ were never uttered, however as one of the winning businesses was one of our clients, I know that the culture they have built and the results they’ve achieved have been because they focused on making sure they had excellent HR processes and initiatives in place! This was one of their key strategies to increase performance and engagement. We worked with them to develop guides for their people leaders around how to use the policies and policies in place to better manage and engage their teams. After training their new Regional Managers focused on coaching and discussing this going forward. They have embedded it in their culture. No wonder they won an award for Strategy and Planning! And even though it wasn’t mentioned, a key part of that was HR strategy and planning.

So at first I was disappointed that HR wasn’t mentioned, when clearly it was such a huge part of what had made these companies excel. But then I realised that was a great thing. Rather than HR being seen as a separate entity, at these awards having great HR was just part of running a great business.

As part of the HR Game Changer conferences this year we’re talking about HR not being HR anymore, but becoming a business partner. Full stop. No HR in front of it.

The Westpac Business Excellence Awards recognised this and that’s a game changer in itself. Thank you to Massey University for inviting me along to great evening!

If you’re interested in how you can change the game for HR, check out the HR Game Changer conference 2015.

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