There is a lot of talk in the HR world about analytics, technology, validation and seats at the table etc… But sometimes, I think all of this talk distracts us from the real purpose of HR. The real purpose of HR is to take care of our customers. Some HR experts will tell you that the customers of HR are our employees or our executives. To me the following are the customers of HR.

• Employees of our organization
• customers of our organization
• various business functions that make up our organization
• executive leadership of our organization

Each of these customers have their own unique requirements and their own expectation of what HR should do for them. Then in addition to our customers, we have HR compliance that we have to ensure is always in line with all Federal, State and City laws and policies. I like to call this the 5-legged stool of HR. With each leg changing in length (priority) depending on the situation.

Regardless of the length (priority) of the legs of the stool, as HR we have to ensure we maintain a balance among all of them. Sometimes you will need to focus on providing value to your executives. Sometimes you will need to focus on providing value to your employees. The challenge for HR is to correctly prioritize when and where to provide value without allowing our other customers to become off balance.