What is Required to Be More Effective in HR?

Almost every organization has an HR “department” (or function) with reputation, customers, purpose, governance, and accountabilities. In HR departments, HR professionals come together to design and deliver HR practices around people, performance, information, and work to increase value to customers, investors, communities, business strategy, and employees. In HR departments, HR professionals learn, have career opportunities, and build relationships.

From the research, let me reinforce two observations about how to upgrade and transform your HR Department. First, focus the HR department on the right priorities. Instead of asking “What are our HR priorities?” the first question should be, “What are the business priorities?” Then comes the question, “How can our HR work support those priorities?” By focusing on business more than HR priorities, HR contributes to business performance.

Second, ensure that HR transformation is more than structure. Our research finds that an effective HR department is not just tweaking the HR operating model or structure. In the Organization Guidance System research, we identified nine dimensions of an HR department that may create value for employees, business, customers, investors, and communities.

HR cannot just focus only on individuals (people, human capital, talent, competencies, employees, or workforce) but must work on the collection of how those individual people join together into organization (process, culture, capabilities, systems, or workplace) by using what we call a human capability blueprint.

Isolating and improving a single HR practice area (e.g., hiring people, orienting new employees, training employees, or paying employees) is not enough; HR must emphasize the integration or bundling of these separate HR practices into integrated solutions and patterns, often called high performance work systems.

Focusing on HR time-based events (annual succession planning, payroll increase, quarterly reviews, or new orientation) is not enough; HR must work on how HR events meld into and create patterns of activities over time.

HR cannot just focus on a single stakeholder (e.g., the employee or line manager) but must keep in mind a broader stakeholder map of employees, line managers, customers, investors, and communities.