HR Alliance Offers an Innovative Approach
Episode 26: I’m happy to welcome Marcy Young to the studio for today’s episode. Marcy is the Founder and CEO of HR Alliance LLC, in Louisville, Kentucky. She’s developed a business model enabling companies to contract with her and her team of HR specialists, without having to hire them in-house. It’s an ideal way to get the HR expertise a business needs for ongoing help, project-based initiatives or a hybrid plan customized to meet specific needs and/or situations.
The pandemic had a significant impact on how businesses retain and recruit talent. This change is a significant part of how Marcy Young and HR Alliance can help small, medium and large companies to move forward.
Meet Marcy Young
Marcy has been in HR for over 25 years. She founded HR Alliance to provide outsourced HR services to help small businesses navigate state laws, HR-compliance issues and many other issues. The services are customized to meet client needs. This limits the expense, while ensuring the business can rely on HR experts to enable them to deal with a myriad of complex issues.
It’s not uncommon for a small business to lack a full understanding of what it actually needs. HR Alliance can advise and guide clients. Marcy’s team provides a full-service suite of capabilities, designed to meet both immediate and long-term needs of their clients. This outsourced approach enables the business to maintain budgetary flexibility.
HR Alliance – Focused on People
Marcy is a people person, at her core. HR Alliance has a heart and compassion for people. It drives her company’s culture, but also determines how her team approaches clients and their HR-needs.
Marcy explains a company’s largest asset is its people. At the same time, its largest expense is payroll. HR Alliance focuses on the areas that make the largest impact on the business and its bottom line. Your people and resulting culture is who you are as a business. This is Marcy’s professional wheelhouse.
Bringing an Outside Perspective
The team at HR Alliance is a talented group of HR professionals who add value by bringing an outside perspective to a company’s internal challenges. They aren’t constrained by internal politics or blinders. This fresh perspective can be an important advantage for business leaders who find themselves struggling to find an effective solution to specific issues.
It’s More than just Compliance; It’s about Culture
With her extensive HR experience, Marcy understands the compliance requirements a business faces. More importantly, she also knows the importance of culture. Knowing your people and keeping them engaged drives retention and satisfaction numbers. COVID forced many, unexpected changes, which led to lower levels of engagement and that feeling of “being connected.” Many companies are struggling to cope with the results of how COVID impacted their company cultures.
Marcy discusses how the market is now very different – but incredibly exciting from an HR perspective. Companies are really looking at culture with a renewed focus. She comments that companies which already had a strong culture tended to fair better during the pandemic. They were able to make better decisions, compared to businesses that weren’t as culturally connected. HR Alliance can help a company to understand its current culture and begin to evolve it into the culture it’ll need in order to thrive in the future.
Culture’s Impact on Hiring
Marcy explores how it’s not always about the money, especially with millennials. Culture is an important consideration for prospective candidates. Both the employee and the employer want a cultural fit. HR Alliance can help a business to understand this and find the right balance.
People want to be part of something. They want to feel included and valued. Business leaders have to find a way to gauge how employees are feeling and what is (or is not) working. This is an important aspect of cultural fit. Marcy and her team tend to shine in this area, because they recognize this is the heart of what they do and a big part of the culture HR Alliance has developed for itself. Now, they help other organizations to recognize and move in a similar direction.
Helping Small Businesses to Retain Key Employees
Let’s face it, for a high-performing employee, it’s a buyer’s market. Recruiters are extremely active and may already be approaching your key employees. A business has to find a way to keep employees engaged.
Reward and recognition programs may have good intentions, but as Marcy explains, they sometimes they miss the mark. Often, it’s because the leadership failed to understand or recognize who their employees are.
Marcy recommends company leaders become increasingly more focused on getting to know their people. You have to meet people where they are. Conducting “stay interviews” to find out why people have chosen to stay at your company will provide invaluable insights. These conversations can also reveal better ways to reward and/or recognize an individual’s contribution to the company’s success.
Every company has a culture. It’s important to discover exactly what yours is. This will help you to find new employees who are more fully-aligned with the mission and vision of your company. That can lead to improved performance and retention levels.
A key element of a company’s culture is the leadership’s “say-do ratio.” One way to quickly wreck employee engagement is for a leader to make commitments to certain initiatives or changes, and then to fail to execute on those commitments. The employees see this. More importantly, if occurs frequently, they won’t forget it.
HR Alliance can help a leadership team to fully understand the impact not following through. At the same time, HR Alliance can also assist a company to more fully design and implement an effective, change initiative.
Providing Better Insights
Communication is vital to a company’s success. HR Alliance has a number of techniques and tools to solicit and analyze employee feedback. This analysis provides detailed insights about a company’s true culture, the leadership team and where roadblocks may exist. Marcy’s team will provide recommendation as to how to take what the feedback is and how to best use it to move forward. It’s a way to achieve better alignment and to begin to resolve organizational challenges. Feeling heard is something many employees desire and it’s a key reason many decide to remain with an employer, longer.
Partnering with You to Achieve Your Success
We wrap up today’s discussion with an overview of various ways HR Alliance can partner with a business owner or leadership team. They take a holistic approach to client relationships. It begins with listening to learn about the immediate concerns and challenges. HR Alliance’s comprehensive human resources skill set is available, should the business decide it wants to evolve into a more comprehensive relationship.
Here are a few of the services HR Alliance Can Provide:
- Employee Relations
- Retention Strategies
- Training and Executive Development
- Recruiting, Interviewing, Offer Letters and Terminations
- Performance Management
- Regulatory Compliance (including multi-state compliance)
- Policy and Procedure Manuals
Does Your Company Need Help with an HR Issue?
Contact Marcy Young and her team of HR Professionals for a confidential discussion.
Website: https://yourhralliance.com/
Phone: (502) 689-6009
Thank you for taking the time to listen to this episode. From more information on business-related issues, visit my website at www.JimRayConsultingServices.com.
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Until next time, remember, if you need help with your small business, Let’s Grow For It!