How is HR structured in most of the organizations? What are the underlying principles behind such designs? How do HR interventions get planned and executed? How do they measure HR outcomes and relate with business challenges? Did it finally help the business or came across as a disconnect? If it did not help the business, what did they miss out doing??
These are some pertinent questions that comes to my mind when a client approaches me saying their HR is weak and something significant needs to be done to transform or fix the issue.
Let us examine this by raising few obvious questions:
- How is HR strategy formulated?
- How HR is structured?
- How HR outcomes are measured?
- How these HR outcomes finally helped in addressing business challenges?.
HR has many sub-functions, like Talent acquisition, HR operations, Talent Development, Talent Management, etc, All these sub-functions have their own focus area within HR and probably they are successfully functioning. It is important to note that more often HR is structured based on benchmark information referring to similar size, industry in a given location or region or based on past experience of HR professionals leading that department.
The key missing link most of the time observed, is that it is never reflected further to see how the same structure is effective in addressing specific organization's business problems or challenges. We may wonder, how can such an important component gets missed out. Few common observations noticed were taking extra step to understand business problems in detail, HR sometimes gets confused and believes that as long as they satisfy Top leadership that should be good enough and they are busy aligning themselves with the Top Leadership. It is not a wrong thing to do, however each time the control lying with the top leader as opposed to commonly shared objectives that HR needs to deliver as agreed with the leadership team. In the absence of this, day to day HR management caters to satisfying the top leader and it stops there.
Without a proper HR strategy linked to business, the expectation set for smaller HR sub-functions is quite vague and overall results achieved, provide mixed response to address business objectives. Hence sub functions of HR lacks synergy to bring that cohesion amongst themselves to create that impact.
What are some common business expectations from HR :
- Ability of HR to Ramp up resources ( Time to staff) and make sure business is operational and delivers results.
- Ability to manage HR costs, so that there are no idle resources or over used resources, which lead to burn out and eventually unproductive to organization
- To make sure business performance is not suffered by creating the right expectations, right environment, introducing right policies and ensure performance issues are managed. In short, HR to ensure each resource in the organization are contributing to the business.
- Time to build talent at all levels much ahead of competitors and create opportunity for business to take up more opportunities in the market place.
- Anticipate business ups and downs and help in downsizing the business, by having smooth outplacement, re-killing interventions, so that in changing situation, HR is able to down size and does not cause additional cost impact to the organization.
I wonder many a times, HR department looses this big picture of business, and quite often caught up in managing each of those sub-functions. They generate good MIS, which were rarely seen seriously other than HR cost to business. Reason :individually they may be doing great job, collectively they lack synergy.
Having discussed some key expectation of business from HR as mentioned earlier, how HR needs to organize itself and respond? Let us examine the following Schematic Representation:
Please consider the above example merely as an illustration, of how possibly HR sub-functions can be organized to address business issues. However, business issues in every organization is unique and specific. Therefore, HR structuring needs to be done considering those specific inputs.
Most of the time, HR is never visualized as top down. This can be improved if we consider following key aspects, while doing HR planning.
1. Understand Current and future Business challenges
2. Formulate HR strategies to address those challenges ( HR strategy should clearly articulate How each of those challenges can be resolved)
3. Design HR organization holistically to deliver business results.
4. Measure HR outcomes
5. Review whether HR outcomes finally helped in addressing business challenges.
In the absence of a top down approach, bottom up results emerged from HR, often seen as a disconnect and creates unnecessary over-load over a period of time and HR will be perceived non-value adding.
We can also refer to HR Value proposition proposed by .Dave Ulrich
He puts it so beautifully,: Transformation of HR begins with defining HR value, but value is defined by the receiver
He further says the elements of HR value proposition include the following
- Knowing external business realities
- Serving external and internal stakeholders
- Crafting HR practices
- Building HR resources
- Ensuring HR professionalism
To conclude, many progressive organizations globally have achieved tremendous success by constantly linking HR strategy with business strategy and such organizations are clearly aware of tangible and intangible results HR contributed to the business. Isn't it good news for all of us to take the path of growth and success? In such a scenario, HR will be perceived as one of the key contributors for achieving organizational excellence.
Please share your views.
Aravinda Prabhu T, is an organizational Development Consultant and Trainer, having 23 years experience in HR and Consulting experience in HR over 13 years, extensively working with clients In India, Middle East ( Oman), Africa, US and South East Asia region. You can connect with him at: aravinda.prabhu@Mpower-HR.com
