WHILE Australian HR practices fare reasonably well compared to global practices, many local professionals still struggle with understanding how HR fits into the business of their wider organisations
WHILE Australian HR practices fare reasonably well compared to global practices, many local professionals still struggle with understanding how HR fits into the business of their wider organisations.
That’s the message from a recent human capital expert visiting from the US, Garrett Sheridan, who specialises in aligning business strategy and people strategies to deliver improved business performance.
He said that HR professionals still struggled to step up to the business partner plate, and often lacked an understanding of how to link key business drivers to necessary competencies in recruitment and performance management processes.
“HR professionals are often focused on the quality of the forms for performance management rather than the content that goes into them,” he said.
“We have to look at what the critical business results that should populate every individual and team business scorecard objectives, and what are the competencies that will drive those. Unless you have those links its very hard to get line operations people excited, because they just see it as nice to have HR process.”
He gave the example of trying to secure the buy-in of a COO in a telecommunications company. Their priorities might include revenue base, cost structure and customer service. These would then be mapped against the key drivers of HR strategy, so that “what you’re doing for the business leader is high value adding”, Sheridan said.
“That conversation is hugely valuable to operations folks and it can elevate the HR person away from being a process administrator to more of a business partner.
“By not having the core ingredients in terms of business drivers actually aligned with performance management in an organisation, we just get off to a bad start,” he said. “I think that’s a real gap here in terms of really understanding how to effectively partner with the business and get the CEO interested.”
Sheridan said that initiatives with this approach are more likely to secure top-level business sponsorship, as executives tend to regard them as business performance management issues, not just people management issues.
HR needs to partner with the business around what the business wants to do versus the HR processes that they want to drive, he said.
