Every issue, Fortune magazine profiles a company on their “Best Companies to Work For” list. This month, they chose SAS, an analytics software firm.

The main perk cited in the article is SAS’s awesome daycare offering. They subsidize 75 percent of the cost for their on-site daycare facility, which features high-quality caregivers, an on-call doctor, and close proximity to the cafeteria for easy parent-child lunches.

Other perks include:

• The opportunity to win “SAS bucks’ that can be used towards a free haircut at the on-site hair salon.
• On-site car wash and detailing, dry cleaning, and alterations (all subsidized).
• Flexible work schedules.
• On-site medical facilities.

These are all great, but they’re not the types of things that make SAS a great place to work. In fact, if a well-intentioned HR pro read this list and thought, “I want to be a ‘Best Place to Work.’ I’m going to implement these things at my organization!” they would most likely fail. Hard.

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Renegade HR is really about two things:

1. Hiring great people.
2. Enabling them to do great things that drive your business.

Hiring great people can be difficult. It takes time to get it right.

If you want to be a better HR pro today, find out what’s stopping your employees from doing great things. If you can, ask them directly. Speak to their managers, too.

Once you find out what they need to do great things, get it for them.

Maybe it’s more direction and feedback. That’s something that should obviously come from their manager. But part of your job as an HR Renegade is coach managers on how to better manage.

Maybe a policy or procedure is getting in the way. Find out how to get rid of it, if possible.

A rising tide lifts all boats. Help your managers and the people they lead do better work, and you’ll be a better HR pro.

Should corporate values be aspirational or reflect the way your company actually operates?

Some people argue that if your values aren’t reflective of your actual culture, they’re disingenuous. Other people assert that if your culture sucks, you should aspire (and actively work) to improve it.

Here’s my take: If your culture rocks, your values already reflect that, whether they’re written down or not. And if your culture sucks, it doesn’t matter what your stated values are if you’re not actively working to fix it.

Zappos (who I also wrote about on Monday) believes in this thing called “committable values.” That means they’ll actually make hiring and firing decisions based on them.

What are your organization’s values? Are they committable?

You may or may not have heard that Zappos, the online retailer, was recently purchased by Amazon.com for a ton of money. One of my favorite things about the sale was the way Tony Hsieh, CEO of Zappos, told his employees.

Read Tony’s email

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Laurie Ruettimann of Punk Rock HR discusses the future of human resources. (34:52)

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Direct mp3 download

Links from the podcast

• SHRM, Kennedy, & Blowing Up Human Resources
• The Zappos Culture Book
• Monday is Pitch-a-Policy Day
• The case for the HR generalist

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If you’re not familiar with ROWE (the Results Only Work Environment), here’s the 30-second elevator pitch: Employees can do whatever they want, whenever they want, as long as the work gets done. Just like in college, they can’t lie, cheat or steal. But as long as they do their work, they can work wherever and whenever they want to.

I actually like ROWE. A lot. In college, your professor didn’t care where you wrote your paper or when you wrote it, as long as you met the requirements and got it in by the deadline. Why do we treat employees like grade schoolers again once they hit the working world?

That said, ROWE isn’t perfect. Today, I want to tell you why I don’t like ROWE.

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There’s a trend towards the hyper-specialization of human resources. Today, I make the case for the HR generalist.

I have nothing against HR specialists. In fact, I think they’re incredibly important. People who are experts are sourcing can often do a far better job finding rockstar candidates that someone who occasionally recruits. Employment law specialists know far more about the legal nuances of being an employer than the typical generalist ever will.

Specialists are a crucial part of HR, but so are generalists.

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