Simon Hayward, CEO of Academee learning solutions looks through his crystal ball to present his key HR predictions for 2006.

Key HR trends for 2006 reflect the increasingly strategic role of the function in organisations based on the recognition that great people are the key to delivering a differentiated service in an increasingly commoditised world.

Getting the right people “on the bus”, developing the capabilities to lead and deliver a branded service, providing career paths to keep talent, are all part of the People Agenda.

Some of the key HR trends we see in our clients across various sectors as they work on the People Agenda are described below. These all indicate the increasing need for alignment of HR with the organisation as a whole and with other business functions (finance, procurement, marketing and IT) in particular to achieve the real impact HR can now make.

1. Marketing & HR partnership
Marketing and HR are working closer together in defining and delivering employee communications and engagement programmes including service brand implementation and business transformation. This is based on some key insights:

• Marketing and internal communications are two sides of the same coin – communicating with customers needs to be mirrored in communicating with employees.




• Service delivery is a critical competitive battle ground and leading organisations are making sure that their customers’ experience delivers the organisation’s brand promise in each and every contact.




• To achieve this each person in the organisation needs to believe in and deliver the brand promise through the way they behave, both with colleagues, partners and customers.

So marketing and HR are working more closely together to achieve a truly branded customer experience. The collaboration has great potential to continue into the future, working to deliver the service profit chain through people.

2. Shared service model
Over the last few years the shared service model has moved into the mainstream for HR as well as other business functions. Implementation of it can be a challenging process of change, with the need to change the way both HR people and the customers of HR work on a day-to-day basis.

The shared service model has an increased emphasis on specialists in key areas such as staffing, compensation and benefits, learning and employee relations, business partners managing the relationship with and service to the internal customer, self service for customers in many transactional areas and telephone-based service from skilled HR professionals in others. This is a complex set of services to set up and coordinate and it needs strong programme and stakeholder management to deliver effectively.

The next stage for many organisations is now to achieve step improvements in two key areas:

• Relationships – optimising the coherence of HR provision through improving the quality of relationships between HR groups and with the customers.




• Capability – continuing to develop capability across the HR groups in depth in order to improve the quality and strategic impact of service to customers.

3. Professional Procurement
Professional procurement is having an increasingly significant impact on all areas of HR provision, with the purchasing function driving more stringent negotiations with third parties such as outsourcers, learning providers, and consultants.

One example of this is the way organisations have moved to a preferred supplier list or framework model for managing third party providers in a more rational and cost-effective way, to drive down overall costs and improve service delivery. The impact on the organisation can include the benefits of lower costs and coordinated supply, as well as the frustrations of being forced to use a limited range of providers that may not be perceived as being suitable to individual customer needs.

The result is a need to manage stakeholders within the organisation more effectively to ensure that the benefits come through with none of the frustrations.

4. Talent
Having the best people possible is a key competitive battleground and HR is perceived as having a strategic role in the majority of significant organisations we see in the attraction, development and retention of highly talented people in all key roles.

So talent management, career mapping and competence-based selection and development have become key tools for organisations as they seek to motivate the best people to stay and to contribute fully to the organisation’s competitive efforts.

The underlying issue, however, is that the balance of power has shifted from the employer to the talented employee and we only need to look at English football to see what this can mean in terms of escalating wage costs, individualistic behaviour and increasing tensions between aspirations and opportunity. The talent bubble is yet to burst, but it is expanding rapidly.