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.

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

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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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I spend a lot of time writing about ways to drive your business by recruiting great people and inspiring them to do amazing things.

Those are just ideas. I’d like to think they’re really good ideas, but they’re still just ideas. They’re completely useless if you don’t do anything with them.

What are you doing to drive your business? Not what are you planning on doing – what are you actually doing?

Coming up with lots of great ideas is only the first step. Start putting those ideas in action today!

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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Today, I’m excited to feature a guest post by Eva Rykr of iOrgPsych.

To make an improvement, you must start with measuring what you have. To truly know the impact of a change, you must evaluate pre and post. But to make the best decisions, you must discover the seemingly unknowable. It’s not impossible, it just requires that you gather lots and lots of data. This is where analytics comes in.

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