A strong relationship between the two important departments within the organization (HR and finance) is the key to any business success in general, and the talent acquisition practices in particular. However, the core values of each department can grow extremely different through the time that the company develops. Therefore, it is difficult for them to find common ground. While HR departments consider human resources as the greatest assets, finance departments only value money.
Due to the differences in the nature of each department’s work, they are often caught in the conflict. HR departments have long found it hard to evaluate the ROI of their talent acquisition programs and cannot find the statistics to effectively communicate with the CFO. On the other hand, Finance managers often regard HR as the defenders of the workforce, only asking for more benefits for the staff (which means more cost for the company to bear).
There may be conflicts in the appearance of their relationship. However, we all know that both HR and finance are aiming to achieve the same goal: a healthy and successful company. According to a global survey of CHROs and CFOs, the cooperation of the two departments can lead to positive business outcomes, including enhanced productivity and engagement, higher revenue and profit. Actually, they have many things to learn from each other.
What Has Finance Learned from HR?
The business’s human factor: CFOs were commonly perceived as naysayers, especially in the eyes of HR teams. That is because they are responsible for making tough financial decision to ensure that the firm move forward. By working closely with HR department, the human element of business is well incorporated into the finance department’s long-term strategic plans.
Seeing beyond ROI: CFOs will understand that not all business success can be easily quantified. It is difficult to determine precisely how much an employee program will benefit the organization’s profitability. However, good CFOs are seeing the changes and know how wise investment in HR can positively impact the business performance, even in an unquantifiable way.
What has HR learned from finance?
Nowadays, the best performing companies are becoming to place HR managers in strategic plan. From the closer relationship with the finance department, they have learned:
The Business Perspective: As a CFO, there is only one question that counts: What is the business performance after following this decision? With the mind of the CFO, Solid HR managers are beginning how to partly quantify and qualify investments in human resources.
Using People Data: Working with data, statistics are one of the key strength of the finance department. By working together with them, effective HR managers can build up skills to measure performance metrics in order to reach business goal. As a result, they can develop suitable practices for collecting, tracking, reporting and analyzing the data involving human resources.
To sum up, by working closely together as Faro Recruitment Vietnam’s guidance, finance and HR teams have developed strong partnerships, driving the organization towards overall success.