Christine Wzorek is a past student of mine who reconnected with me on LinkedIn a few months back and has been calling me out on my failure to address V-REEL™ applications for human resources (HR) ever since. It’s great! I really appreciate her setting me straight on this because she’s right. V-REEL™ can be used by HR departments to help them think about their strategic contributions to the organization as a whole. V-REEL™ is a framework that prompts thinkers to consider an organization’s or individual’s resources and capabilities in terms of their Value and Rareness; and then consider what might come along to Erode that value, what Enablers could be put in place to keep erosion in check, and finally, Longevity. How long it will take to get key enablers in place, or before things change altogether?
Christine is thinking through all of that with her own human resource (HR) department and she is challenging her peers in the profession to do the same. She hopes that by thinking more strategically, HR professionals can overhaul traditional compliance-driven HR operations and combat negative HR stereotypes.
Christine has been in the HR profession for a while and is now the Director of HR for Four Foods Group, a multi-unit restaurant developer in Utah. Four Foods Group acquires a lot of smaller, fast casual restaurants, where the success of the business is heavily dependent on the abilities of restaurant staff. Human resource management is a key enabler for any organization but with that many customer-focused staff, effective HR management is essential.
Addressing HR’s Eroding Factors and Creating Key Enablers
“As a team, we look at what are our eroding factors, and how do we convert those into enabling factors; or can we eliminate an eroding factor if we can’t convert it to an enabling factor?” she said.
It’s easy for HR departments to get swamped under mountains of paperwork, but Christine ’s team, with the goal of 100 percent compliance, is choosing to take a proactive approach to preventing HR issues and she’s using V-REEL™ to get everyone thinking more strategically about just how to do that.
“We can look at the value that we’re generating…to become a profit center for the company instead of just getting lost in the weeds,” she said.
Developing a new HR strategy using V-REEL™
Some might be inclined to scoff at the prospect of HR as a profit center but Christine has thought this through. She’s on to something.
“If HR is a profit center, we have to be strategizing just like any other department in the organization. How is value generated by the rareness, the eroding, the enabling factors, and longevity? Let’s look at generating value for our HR department by identifying what’s rare within the organization and asking, how do we tailor our HR activities to that rareness?”
HR can become a key enabling factor for an organization by contributing to its ability to be valuable and rare in the marketplace. By thinking about her HR operation through the V-REEL™ lens, Christine is defining a new strategy not just for Four Foods HR but for the HR discipline as a whole. She’s challenging her peers. She being a disrupter. I think you’ll enjoy the podcast.