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Human Resources  |  Employee and Organizational Development  |  Consulting Services

 Consulting Services @ HR

Consulting Services

Highlights

Your Human Resources (HR) Consultant and Employee and Organizational Development (EOD) collaborate to offer a wide range of consulting services. This partnership is comprised of subject matter experts dedicated to support your specific business needs. If you are interested in any of the following services contact your HR Consultant at 277-2013 or EOD at 277-1555.

When to Contact a Consultant

The Division of Human Resources (HR) provides strategic, long-term, forward-thinking consultation to include, but not limited to, helping the organization prepare for change, forecasting human capital needs for specialized skills and knowledge to achieve strategic goals; talent management; restructures; and developing performance management systems that support strategic objectives.

Your HR Consultant

  • Provides operational day to day human resources guidance to include recruitment and hiring for current staff job openings, resolving complaints, and improving communication with employees,
  • Provides administrative support focused on compliance issues and record keeping via the HRIT services to manage HR data and create compliance reports, and
  • Serves as a change agent in support of continuous improvement and technological advancement.

Your HR Consultant provides consultation regarding your organization's human resources initiatives to include:

  • Staff planning and employment;
  • Staff compensation and benefits;
  • Employment laws, regulations, and University of New Mexico policies and procedures;
  • Performance management; and
  • Occupational health and safety.

Your HR Consultant and Employee and Organizational Development partner to provide tools and processes to enhance knowledge, skills and abilities in the areas of:

  • Communication
  • Conflict management
  • Managing change
  • Strategic management
  • Team building

Your HR Consultant assists organizations in building networks of HR professionals and encouraging sharing of best HR practices. You may acquire HR support and understand the resources available at the University of New Mexico through your HR Consultant. The Division of Human Resources provides avenues of communication to ensure you are aware of changes in HR that affects your organization.

In addition, your HR Consultant and Employee and Organizational Development (EOD) partner to offer a more in-depth perspective on training in the areas of:

Coaching

We all need objective feedback, support, and guidance to grow and develop. Coaching is a tailored one-on-one process that provides individuals with support to increase job effectiveness. The Division of Human Resources can provide coaching to help examine workplace behavior, style, and explore alternatives that may be more effective.

Individual coaching is voluntary, confidential and goal-oriented. For managers, your HR Consultant and EOD partner to identify higher-level department specific needs such as training or performance management. We may provide you feedback on your leadership skills that will enhance the performance of your organization. We can address overall development needs or focus on context-specific situations. Additionally, we can offer guidance on appropriate resources and tools available to managers.

Customer Service

How would your customers rate the service they receive from your department? If you can't answer that question - or if you don't want to answer it - EOD can help.

Customer Service is an integral part of the University's Strategic Plan. To help departments align with this strategy, EOD offers services to help individuals, teams, and departments improve customer service. Based on an initial assessment, EOD may help you select the best plan for improving customer service.

EOD offers a wide range of customized support services, including:

  • Assistance with the design and analysis of customer surveys,
  • Design and facilitation of focus groups,
  • Teambuilding sessions to improve service through teamwork,
  • Customized training,
  • Help with setting service goals and standards,
  • Training to prepare staff members for delivering in-house customer
    service classes, and
  • Customer Service specifically designed for Student Employees.

Facilitation

Your HR Consultant and EOD partner to help you conduct productive meetings and retreats. Our HR professionals are trained to provide structure for effective communication among group members, focusing on the delicate balance of group dynamics, and group process. Our services include helping you develop a realistic meeting agenda, guiding the meeting process, moving groups beyond disagreement and conflict, helping groups reach decisions, and developing action plans for post-meeting implementation. Your HR Consultant and EOD work closely together after the facilitation session to assist you with the implementation of your action plans.

Examples of when you may benefit from professional meeting facilitation include:

  • Committee and project team meetings,
  • Board retreats,
  • Conferences,
  • Annual meetings,
  • Focus groups, and
  • Workgroup planning retreats.

As facilitators, we see meetings and retreats as an opportunity for group leaders and members to learn effective processes for creating, planning, problem-solving, and decision-making.

Strategic Planning

Strategic Planning is a decision-making process that asks the right questions, focuses on the future of your department, and identifies the steps to get where you want to go. Your HR Consultant and EOD partner to assist managers with a planning process for organizing and conducting both short and long-range planning with your staff. Whether you are planning for a large or small department, this strategic planning framework will help you plan in a way that will drive decision-making and reduce the unexpected.

Effective planning involves the use of a structured organizational assessment that asks the following questions:

  • What is our mission?
  • Who are our customers?
  • What do our customers value?
  • What are the results we seek and how do we define these results?
  • What is our plan and what will be our goals?
  • How do these goals align with UNM big picture goals?

Your HR professionals offer strategic planning for your department, either through one-on-one consultation or by facilitating a departmental planning retreat.

Team Building

Team-building is a planned process that utilizes a structured set of strategies and activities designed to improve team performance and teamwork. Team-building is offered to new and existing teams as well as special work groups such as project task forces or committees.

Team building generally focuses on four major areas:

  • Assessment of team effectiveness,
  • Goal and task accomplishment,
  • Relationships and communication, and
  • Leadership and team processes.

What We Do... EOD offers a broad spectrum of Team-building Services

  • Confidential manager/team leader consultation,
  • Design of teambuilding sessions and retreats,
  • Facilitation of teambuilding sessions and retreats,
  • Training seminars focused on high performance team development and group processes, offered through EOD's open enrollment workshops or customized for existing teams,
  • Personalized coaching for team leaders, and
  • Activities that take place onsite at your location, or at EOD's fully-equipped facilities.

How We Do It

EOD, in collaboration with your HR Consultant, the team leader, or work-group manager, begins a confidential consultation, followed by an assessment session with the entire team. Favoring a participatory approach, we work with the leader and members to design a customized team development intervention. In most cases, we will facilitate team building activities. We can also train and coach team leaders who prefer to facilitate their own team building sessions.

Here are examples of situations that would benefit from team-building consultations:

  • A team has too many conflicting priorities and members feel that they've lost their sense of focus and purpose. They want to hold a retreat in order to create a new mission and vision statement.
  • A newly-formed team is having difficulty coming to agreement on important decisions.
  • A team leader is seeking ways to build motivation, and morale and energize his/her team.
  • A manager/leader is launching a new project team and is seeking advice in how to recruit the right mix of people.
  • Political issues and delicate egos have begun to compromise a team's objective.
  • A team feels it is not getting the support it needs from management. A team leader is looking for ideas on ways to recognize and reward his/her team's successes.

HR Presents

Your HR Consultant can provide HR Presents training to your organization. HR Presents is a series of one-to-two-hour presentations that can be conducted at your work location. These training sessions will provide you and your staff with timely information about specific employment laws, regulations, and University of New Mexico (UNM) policies, procedures, and practices. For more information, please visit http://hr.unm.edu/abouthr/hrpresents.php.