By Stephanie H. Nelson, Managing Consultant at BlueFire HR by FutureSense

Managing Where do employees go when they need help, motivation, or somewhere to be heard? The answer is Human Resources (HR), or at least it should be. Of the many HR responsibilities, these are often the most difficult for non-HR professionals to fill. HR is the place to go when you aren’t sure where to go.

What should employees expect from HR? 

All HR professionals partially serve to provide a tactical objective. They are there to answer employees’ questions and concerns, maintain benefits and ensure paychecks are received. The goal is to help employees stay focused and productive while balancing their work and lives.

What should a company and its management team expect from an HR Team?

All HR professionals have the ability to mentor and coach managers, executives, and employees in everything from surviving COVID-19 to navigating policies. They are staff advocates. Additionally, HR should be an advocate of the company while achieving success.

What are the responsibilities of an HR Department?

In addition to staff support and relations, all HR teams dedicate their time to improving HR practices, including: 

• Creating robust hiring processes

• Ensuring consistency with onboarding and orientation 

• Continuous training of management in compliance and leadership to include harassment training for all managers and employees

• Updating your employee handbooks and personnel policies

• Tackling compliance with wage and hour obligations

• Creating efficient retention and turnover prevention strategies

• Leveraging and creating performance management and talent optimization strategies

• Appropriately handling employee complaints and issues (to name a few)

Have questions about HR? Connect with Stephanie here!

Is Your Pricing Strategy Leaving Money on the Table?

Article by Industry Week

If you have taken a marketing class, you will for sure know about the 4 Ps of marketing: product, packaging, place and price. The 4 Ps have been around for over 50 years and have been widely adopted in most organizations. The key word here is “most.” In the industrial and manufacturing world, one of the P’s is highly neglected. Many firms manage their marketing strategy without having a declared pricing strategy, a formal price management process or a focus on pricing discipline. This is why I often say that pricing is the orphan of the industrial marketing mix.

In 2011, Kevin Mitchell, president of the Professional Pricing Society, was quoted saying that only 5% of Fortune 500 US firms had a dedicated pricing team. This number was a guess-timation based on attendance to pricing events and participation in social media groups related to pricing. Since then, this number has been widely used to depict the level of adoption of pricing in large organizations across the board.

To set the record straight, I wanted to investigate the penetration of the pricing function in large U.S. industrial firms and answer the following research questions:

1.   How many U.S. industrial firms have a dedicated pricing team?

2.   How many U.S. industrial firms have dedicated pricing roles or titles?

4.   When firms have dedicated pricing titles, what are the types of titles?

5.   What is the size distribution of these pricing teams?

Why are these questions so important? They are critical for multiple reasons that I list below.

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NONPROFITS’ MANY ROADS TO REVENUE GENERATION

Article by Stanford Social Innovation Review

As the boundaries between business and charity become increasingly blurred, many nonprofits are considering how to pursue their mission through revenue-generating activities rather than relying on philanthropic contributions alone. This trend toward commercialization was sparked by dwindling governmental and donor support in the 1980s and ’90s, which created mounting pressure on nonprofits to diversify their funding sources. More recently, starting in the early 2000s, new types of resource providers emerged seeking to support nonprofits that generate financially—not just social—returns. By the early 2010s, even traditional charitable foundations began pursuing impact-investment strategies. Encouraged by these opportunities, nonprofit leaders increasingly see commercialization not as a necessary evil, but as a promising way to enhance and expand their social mission.

Integrating revenue-generating activities within a nonprofit’s existing organizational model is not simple. To be effective in the long term, any shift toward commercialization must be consistent with the organization’s social mission and use its core capabilities. Yet nonprofits often struggle to find new approaches that enhance—rather than distract from—the social mission. Moreover, commercialization initiatives stretch already limited resources and often require new skills and expertise beyond the capacity of the current team. How, then, can nonprofit leaders identify a viable commercialization strategy?

Based on more than a decade of research on nonprofit organizations and social-business hybrids, including 1,200 that filed applications with Enterprising Nonprofits (ENP), a major Canadian grantmaking body, we have identified three approaches for integrating revenue generation within an organization’s social mission.4 They are the customer model, in which integration occurs through who is served; the employee model, in which integration occurs through who is hired; and the product model, in which integration occurs through what is sold. To inform the decision making of nonprofit leaders considering their first—or next—move toward commercialization, we developed a framework outlining these alternatives and an associated set of decision criteria. The core premise of our framework is that there are multiple ways in which a nonprofit can integrate revenue-generating activities with its social mission, and leaders should choose the approach, or combination of approaches, that best fits their organization’s mission, resources, and capabilities.

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