Power to the People
Eugenio Pirri asks: Does HR strategy need a new strategy?
After a rocky few months, during which HR has been lambasted across various media, the conference season gives us an opportunity to meet up and chew the proverbial cud over how to take our industry forward.
In recent weeks, the Harvard Business Review has suggested HR should be ‘blown up’. HRville interviewee Chris Roebuck has said that too many organisations are struggling with ‘high-end’ HR. Even the CIPD has put HR in the firing line for the productivity crisis afflicting the UK.
We should be grateful that the HR community will be reunited at various conferences this autumn, seeking enlightenment from ‘old faithful’ ways of succeeding in HR. Right?
Well, not necessarily. With blow after crippling blow bearing down on ‘old faithful’ HR practices, surely the profession needs to look outside its own community for inspiration.
Sharing best practice and networking with peers is a great development tool – but it’s only one method.
The seismic shift needed to take UK plc into a world-class position isn’t going to come from HR directors doing a slightly augmented version of what we’ve always done.
Surely, that will only deliver slightly better results than we’ve always had.
Partnering good, admin bad
I recently read a study from the Centre for Effective Organisations at the University of Southern California. It found that HR leaders spend 50% of their time developing HR programmes, 25% on strategic business partnering activities and 25% on record keeping and auditing.
The study found that in companies where HR leaders spend more time on partnering and less on admin, the department is perceived to be more successful.
I’m tempted to use a vulgar cliché here, involving the fictional detective Sherlock Holmes, to imply that this is a rather obvious observation.
But what’s shocking is that the University conducts the same survey annually and found these figures have not changed at all since 1995.
HR leaders, then, are not learning to take more time on building strategic business partnering activities and less on actual HR.
People are business
I also question why the success of people strategy has to fall so heavily on the HR director and the HR department.
I’m not trying to shirk responsibility. But if CEOs agree people are their greatest asset, then I have to assume that when HR comes under attack, it has to be because HR has put itself into a silo.
People strategy is a whole business issue, not a burden resting on just one department. We all manage our own budgets without the finance director having to keep our records for us. Why is the same not true for people?
Put it this way – if people strategy is to be the lynchpin of organisational success, we need to think more laterally and innovatively.
Will the brightest and the best university graduates really want to come and work for an HR function seen as being in the doldrums of business? Will other parts of your organisation expect great things to come out of the HR department if they don’t understand its purpose?
Probably not. So it’s time to plan an effective HR strategy for HR strategy itself.
Show, demonstrate, think
Show your colleagues in other parts of the business the bottom line results of effective employee engagement. Demonstrate that customer service, motivation and productivity can be improved from simple and long-term talent and engagement initiatives.
Think creatively about succession planning for your HR department. Empower savvy line managers to take on more people-centric operations, such as recruitment, performance management, talent management or engagement. These could be the bright people who move up the HR ranks of the future.
Build relations with business schools and MBA programmes. Mentor people from outside the HR function. Attend networking events that are not centred around HR.
Consider the innovations coming out of other businesses – new product launches, for example – and think about how these could be applied in your department, or at least what lessons could be learned.
And challenge your team – and yourself – to think outside of the HR box. This isn’t about HR business partnering, but HR leaders repositioning themselves as the enablers of phenomenal people strategy and business innovation, not the gatekeepers to it.
Do these and the seismic shift will come, one conversation at a time.
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