Time is of the ‘Essentials’ – People are Essential to your Professional Service Organisation

Blog 3 in Matt Treadway's series on 'Time is of the Essentials' in Professional Services. This blog takes a closer look at Human Resources within a Professional Services organisation and the importance of your people.

The knowledge of the people in a Professional Service organisation is what is being used to generate income. Therefore, we know that we must look after the people in an organisation throughout their entire time with the business so that each person can achieve their full potential, and the business can maximise revenue from the employees.

As an accountant, I tended to take a cold hard look at the Human Resource (HR) function and see it as a non-financial, non-tangible aspect of a business. I found it hard to measure something so subjective and quantify it into neat little boxes. But that all changed one day when I was speaking to an HR director of a major company, who changed my mind with the following statement:

“The HR team manage the firms most expensive asset. The people of this company drive our revenue and growth, which impacts the entire business. We are the biggest cost to the business and the biggest asset. If we don’t value this part of the business, there is no business. How much more vital can a department actually be?”

When I think about HR now, I think that this is the part of the business which manages to bridge my ‘Accountant’s Gap’ of linking financial results and targets of the entire organisation and the fundamental need for humans to be challenged, rewarded and valued.  HR is therefore vital to each and every Professional Service organisation.

If we bring this back to the premise that Time is valuable to us all, then we need to ensure that we invest our time effectively when we look at the following processes:

• Recruiting the best people
• Retaining the best people
• Identifying people with the talent to succeed
• Recording CPD, training and certification
• Identifying people who need training

If we can get all five of these elements right in our organisation, then we are on the first step to being successful.

One of my favourite anecdotes to help illustrate this idea, is a conversation between two Directors of a company:

Director 1: “What happens if we spend lots of money on training people and then they decide to leave?”

Director 2: “What happens if we don’t train them, and they stay?”

Maybe I should get out a bit more, but this always makes me laugh because it is so true! Not developing or investing in people can only lead to stagnation, a feeling of being under-valued and ultimately not delivering their true potential.

Hitachi Solutions Proposition:

Our people here at Hitachi Solutions are the main reason for our success. Part of this is down to our on-going appraisal approach, whereby people are not only recognised for the work that they have done but on the potential that they can deliver in the future.

Organisations using Microsoft Dynamics 365 for Finance and Operations, or those who plan to use it in the future, can make use of the Power Platform, linking with Microsoft Dynamics 365 for Finance and Operations, via the CDS to create a Power App view of people’s potential. The particular Power App I refer to is called a ‘9 box grid’.

You can learn more about the Power Platform and the great work my colleague Will Dorrington is doing here.

Quite simply, a user with no technical know-how can build a matrix to recognise employees at different phases of the ‘Potential’ journey. This tool can then be made available to selected managers to help identify areas where people with the highest potential can be fast-tracked.

In just one short example of how Hitachi Solutions are working on inspiring people to use the Power Platform, we have identified four ongoing activities where Time can be saved:

1. People are given the right role for them, first time, every time
2. The right people in the right role inevitably leads to greater productivity, maximising their time and effort
3. Time spent on training is not wasted on people who will not benefit from it
4. Employees can be advised on areas of opportunity within the organisation that may suit their skills and potential. This saves them leaving the organisation, having to recruit, interview, issuing an offer, paying agency fees………. you get the idea!

As blogs are supposed to be short and to the point, I won’t mention that using our expert HR consultants to really understand your HR policies and benefit from dozens of implementation experiences, we can identify lots more areas for time maximisation.

By joining up the data held in your system, together with innovative ideas, plus the use of the Microsoft technology platform, our clients are destined to maximise the potential of their investment in time.

The next blog in this series will take a look at more of the Microsoft family of products, by focussing on Power Apps, and the various ways that they are added to your ‘Time Maximisation Toolkit’.

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