With the transformation of many HR functions to play a more strategic role, Jan Hills asks: what are the essential technical skills needed to meet business expectations?
In 2007 the CIPD report ‘The Changing HR Function’ found that 53% of organisations had restructured their HR function in the previous year and 81% had done so over the prior five years. This transformed HR model – whilst often described in structural terms – is about creating a function that has the skills and mindset to partner with the business to formulate and execute strategy. This puts demands on HR directors to equip their function in a way that was never required in the past.
The transformed model divides HR into three areas of responsibility and focus. These areas are:
• Shared Service Centres (SSC) which carry out the routine, administrative and transactional aspects of HR. The SSC create economies of scale and depth of expertise in what has been described as ‘the service delivery function’ within HR
• Centres of Expertise or Excellence (CoE), responsible for process, policy and company-wide strategic initiatives. The disciplines covered here vary by company, but will typically include learning and development, compensation, employee relations and recruitment
• HR business partners (HRBP) focused on working closely with the business or a business unit on strategic issues as part of the business area’s management team.
This separation of responsibility and focus on strategic contribution has created demands on HR to develop new skills. These skills range from deeper expertise in operational and technology type disciplines to a greater involvement in understanding of the business and a more commercial and analytical approach.
Traditionally HR has focused on the technical skills associated with the employee life cycle: hiring, compensating, managing performance and leaving the organisation. However, in the transformed HR structure additional skills are needed.
For people in shared services this is about managing slick processes, continually improving the administrative and transactional work and the customer experience. Much of this technical expertise is about customer relations, process management and maximising resources whilst ensuring that employees in the SSC are engaged.
For those in CoE it’s about deep technical expertise in their specialism but also process reengineering – making processes fit for purpose and adaptable enough to meet changing business needs and economic conditions.
For HRBPs the emphasis is on keeping up to date on the employee life cycle tools whilst learning the new technical skills like leading and managing change, work force planning, organisational design and development and coaching and consulting. One HR director described the HRBP as needing the skills of a general practitioner doctor; they need to know enough about each of the areas of HR technical competence. They must be able to analyse and diagnose the problem or opportunity for the business and to know when they need to refer the issue or opportunity to a specialist (a CoE person) or judge that they can handle the initiative successfully themselves.
The depth of skills needed in these areas will vary slightly depending on the specific definition of the role boundaries between the HRBP and the CoE. Whatever the boundaries, business partners and specialists need to have the confidence and practical understanding of what will and will not work in their particular organisation.
Understanding of how to apply technical excellence in the business context is the key requirement. Those HR people with the core and ‘new’ technical skills need the confidence to look at business needs and then practically apply their skills in, for example, change management in a way that meets the goals, culture and sophistication of the business. To develop this confidence and practical approach people must have experience of working in change, OD and leadership projects in addition to the theoretical background.
We have seen a few examples of development programmes that provide this systematically.
Best practice: developing the new technical skills
One development programme that achieves both the theoretical and practical elements of learning involves workshop-based learning focusing on the theory and the best models in the area. This is supplemented by on-job application (in the trainee’s organisation) plus mentoring from an experienced practitioner.
Development must be integrated across the HR function. Creating a development framework with shared experiences, models and language across HR helps to create a culture of joint responsibility for the delivery of value added HR services.
We recommend an approach composed of three integrated development areas. This approach helps to develop an HR team that:
• Has strong technical and process and foundation skills
• Is driven by the beliefs and mindset that our research tells us is the most successful for HR people to adopt
• Has clear experience of what the very best HR people do and how they approach working with the business and their colleagues.
Best practice: creating an HR curriculum and career road map
One of our client’s objectives was to roll out a new HR structure along the lines of the transformed HR model. The HR transformation was staged over three years starting in Europe and then rolling out through Eastern Europe, Asia and Latin America.
The HR curriculum has two linked parts:
• The technical competence required by function and level – matching the competencies associated with each functional role
• The personal and business skills and mindset required to be successful in the transformed HR model and to meet the HR vision of working in partnership with the business.
Part one provides technical skills workshops, e-learning and a toolkit as well as in-house workshops run by CoE to equip HRBPs and SSC staff with the necessary process understanding and knowledge in the CoE area of expertise. The toolkit was designed to meet the need for a common approach across the company that could be applied both within HR – for example, all HR people use the tools on project management when leading projects within the function and with clients. The toolkit also provided reassurance to line clients that a common methodology would be used across business units and geographies.
The second part of the HR curriculum was designed to provide HR related skills that were crucial to the approach the organisation aspired to in working in partnership with the business. This is focused on:
• Strategic skills
• Managing client relationships, and
• Skills in leading HR (leading HR is about taking a stand, having a point of view and being tough minded in order to achieve business goals.)
This part of the curriculum is delivered via workshops and the tools and ideas are applied between workshops to real business issues. We are currently working with the company to introduce more self-directed learning tools in this area.
One thing we have found is that it is important for HR team members to hold strong beliefs about their role in the business agenda. Without this sense of purpose and a belief that they can make a significant contribution to achieving the business goals, any development you give them will tend not to stick.
Jan Hills is a partner at Orion Partners
