Given our recent appearance on the Top 100 HR Blogs list, we figured that there's only one thing to do. That is to add even more great content to the Blog so that you can access ever better content about how to up level your overall knowledge base in both an HR and a business context. To that end we've reached out to thought leaders in particular niches that will help you broaden your perspective as HR Professionals in a landscape where you are increasingly called on to contribute to overall business success, not just HR related outcomes. Our first guest Blogger is Stuart Findlay, a consultant with the Lighthouse Group in Sydney who has over 30 years' experience in business. He holds an accounting degree, MBA and is an internationally accredited executive coach. Stuart is an accomplished facilitator of Building Business Acumen and has great success in mentoring and coaching a range of leaders, aspiring leaders and sales people. In today's post, Stuart distills decades of knowledge and experience into the fundamentals of building business acumen and winning over decision makers.

Today we're really excited to share some news that we're quite proud of over here at Subscribe-HR. We received an email towards the end of last week telling us that we had been included on Feedspot's list of the GLOBAL (#58) Top 100 HR Blogs. Compiled by the team at Feedspot, the list was created by their team after an assessment of multiple factors (outined below). As an organisation that strives to provide authentic, quality content to our audience, we were pleasantly surprised when Feedspot contacted us.

If your organisation is still using manual processes, and / or outdated legacy systems to manage your HR tasks and processes, then you are definitely operating at a disadvantage. In addition to cost and time savings, Cloud based HR software offers multiple benefits, including a considerable reduction in the amount of stress that manual processes induce in your Employees, thus improving overall wellbeing. However, in order to get stakeholders, leadership and the finance team to approve your project, you will need to build a solid Business Case to demonstrate why the project is needed and what the benefits of the project will be when it is finished. Such reasons and benefits may seem perfectly obvious to you and your project team, but to stakeholders and other decision makers it may not be so clear cut. Therefore, a well prepared Business Case can really help you build a watertight argument for the implementation of HR technology. Outlined below are the four pillars upon which a robust Business Case should stand.

Following a decade of research and three years of development, testing and refinement, Subscribe-HR now delivers to you a world first in Performance Management automation and Employee recognition built on a foundation of over 20 years of knowledge and wisdom. For those of you reading this, it might well be easy to dismiss that first sentence as marketing jargon and potentially empty promises. However, Subscribe-HR has delivered other firsts since we started the business: Subscribe-HR was the first software company to create and offer the 'free trial' business model.

Word on the street is that HR needs to adjust its focus from engagement to the more appropriate 'culture management' if business wants to really create workplaces that employees want to be a part of, and will be willing to make a long term commitment to. A recent article on HR Daily indicates that this shift will require HR to focus on 'Employees' relationships and emotions, their sense of meaning and purpose, Leadership capabilities and behaviours, and how these factors align with organisational goals.' The time has also come for organisations to pair this culture management focus with filling the gaps in organisational culture and for the purpose of creating more well rounded, human workplaces.

Creating a culture where Employees are given real-time feedback and recognition might just be the most underestimated strategy in business. And according to the Wall Street Journal, ‘awards, recognition and praise might just be the single most cost effective way to maintain a happy productive workforce.' It’s no secret that ‘Performance Management’ doesn’t achieve what its meant to, but how can you tap into the power of real-time feedback and recognition to improve and enhance managing performance in your business?