Are You Blaming the Problem or the Symptom?

Have you ever thought that it would be wonderful if you could just pay to make all your stress go away? Getting rid of all your stress may be too good to be true, but achieving a drastic reduction in the stress of managing employee problems can be a reality.

A professional employer organization (PEO) can serve as a Human Resources department for small to mid-size companies. Consider this example:

You've just seen the numbers and first-quarter sales are down. You'd been inching along an upward recovery curve for the past two quarters and were looking for a 3% increase. You got your 3%, but it was in the wrong direction. It had a minus sign in front! Do you blame it on sales? Or do you have an HR department that can get involved with the solution?

The HR response:
What is the weak link in the sales chain, the lead, the pitch, or the close? Look at process.
Was there a shift in customer needs? Look at communication.
Has the sales team changed? Look at training.
Is our product falling short? Look at product development.
What feedback is the sales team getting from customers? Look at communication.
Is the sales team keeping up with business evolution and changes in competition? Look at retraining.

HR determines that the chief reason for the drop in sales is that you are taking longer to fill and ship orders than your competition. But HR isn't done yet.

The step-two HR response:
What are the weak points and snags in the current shipping process?
Can we find a better freight company or strike a better deal with our current one?
Can we streamline the paperwork and still keep our accuracy?

In this case, the gut reaction to blame sales would have been wrong. It was an administrative problem with a complex cause involving both communication and process. By having a PEO take the Human Resources approach to analyzing business problems, corrections could be made sooner and another business quarter wasn't wasted trying to fix sales when a time lag in shipping was the main problem.