There has been comment in the HR press recently about the input of Neil Roden, Group HR Director at Royal Bank of Scotland, who is quoted as being keen to see more line involvement in the assessment of HR performance. But what do we think of line assessing our performance? Will such reviews be fair or are HR traditionally regarded as the whipping boys of management?

Many HR teams I have seen, and been a part of on occasions, can have a bunker mentality seeing those on the outside as always being keen to snipe at HR and ‘have a go’. This may be a quite unrepresentative sample of life – but I suspect there is some truth in there somewhere. Assuming this hypothesis is correct, why might this be?

First and foremost I believe some of the problem comes from line management perception of HR as a cost centre and potential drain on resources. This debate will always continue, until it gets placed on a different plane. In my view I think HR frequently miss a trick by a) not managing the review process and b) seeing themselves in isolation.

How often do HR teams set themselves success criteria against which they will be judged? I accept it is often difficult to do so, but nonetheless true measurement of success has to be linked to targets. Yet this is the opportunity for HR to shape the agenda and establish what they really want to be measured against. Clearly criteria will vary by business and the style of HR adopted. There may well be targets in terms of time to recruit, internal SLAs or even measures of employee satisfaction with HR. Why not be radical and go out to line management and individual employees and ask them what the success criteria will be? Possibly this is an outcome of the focus groups Neil Roden was championing, but equally there are other ways of gaining this input.

Does HR isolate itself?
There is a real perception within HR that we see a ourselves as being ‘special’ and in some cases there is concern that line management don’t understand what we do properly. If that’s the case, who’s to blame? It must be our responsibility to ensure that colleagues understand what we do and the contribution we make to business success. But how often do we approach this on our own?

Within many organisations the managerial functions split themselves into internal and external service providers. Externally are business areas such as sales, operations and distribution while ‘internal’ functions include finance, IT and HR. I appreciate this may be a very simplistic approach to organisational structure, but it won’t be too far out in many cases. How often though are there joined up approaches to the assessment of the contribution of the internal functions?

When have we seen Finance and HR for example working together to get their organisations view of their performance? When placed in the context of other internal functions I believe HR can demonstrate a real business contribution – and if we set the agenda for the assessment of all internal functions, all the better!

Let’s have your examples of how you have gone about assessing HR performance. What success stories have there been in using assessment approaches to demonstrate the value and contribution of HR to business success?

Quentin Colborn is an independent HR consultant based in Essex who advises management teams on operational and strategic HR issues. Quentin can be contacted on 01376 571360 or via Quentin@qcpeople.co.uk