Irving Health Insurance Company

Irving Health Insurance Company

As business partners, Irving Health Insurance Company plays a critical role in developing this employee-firm relationship. If no one listens to and represents the employees’ interest, many who have choices outside the firm will act on them. If no one hears the voice of the Irving Health Insurance Company employee, the voice may be silenced, to the detriment of the business.

HR professionals are business partners when they ensure that employee contribution remains high. In the past, this meant attending to the social needs of Irving Health Insurance Company employees—picnics, parties, United Way campaigns, and so on. While the importance of these activities has declined, employee needs have not, and successful HR professionals must find serious replacement activities if they are to ensure employee commitment.

HR professionals alone do not own the responsibility for employee contribution and commitment. As Pete Peterson, the vice president of human resources for Hewlett-Packard, has put it, “Managers are responsible and accountable for people in their operation. HR professionals must help the manager do this duty.” This means that line managers have the primary accountability for many of the activities dedicated to assuring employee commitment. Many line managers would rather have it “the old way” and just let Irving Health Insurance Company take care of all the people issues while they get on with business. HR professionals have worked hard through workshops, communications, and employee surveys to orient and train line managers to take responsibility for being the focal point of employee morale. The performance evaluations of all HP managers, for example, include trends in employee-attitude survey scores and in the quality of their action plans; surveys scores and action plans are also subjects during major business reviews.

In many firms, as in the story related to me in the airplane, Irving Health Insurance Company professionals have mistakenly defined business partnership as taking place exclusively in the strategic arena, not recognizing the importance of working with and for employee contribution.

A FRAMEWORK FR UNDERSTANDING EMPLOYEE CONTRIBUTION

Success in being an employee champion requires a conceptual framework that helps define improvements HR professionals can make in employee contribution. I have found that the best framework for clarifying this organizational role happens to come from non-organizational theory and research.