CHAPTER 7
The HR Business Partner in Action Case Study
7.1 A Quick Recap
So far in the book we have looked at:
• The design of HR to be effective beyond 2017
• How the HR strategic model works
• The specific skills needed to be an HR Business Partner
• Some of the processes that you need to master
• The importance of showing results in monetary terms
• Throughout the book we have stressed the need for creativity and innovation
What exactly does the HR business partner do on a regular basis and how does the job work in practice?
7.2 Putting HR the Business Partner into Practice
Based on a 2017 oil industry example, company size + 20,000 employees.
Background
The company is a large employer employing over 20,000 staff. The HR function is centralized but has HR personnel based at each of the five main site offices. The role of the site-based staff is to provide day-to-day HR support, although this is more like routine clerical HR assistance to the site managers. The company embraced the concept of HR as a business partner but struggled to implement it in the company due to the misunderstanding of what the role involved.
Getting Started
The first hurdle to overcome is how many HR business partners do you need? With five big site offices and a very large central function, how many people will be needed?
In reality its quite small: five people were all that was needed. Most of the existing HR employees wanted to do this job, unaware of the specialist skills that would be needed.
Where Would the Business Partner Staff Be Based?
It’s a central function. If you look at the time split, with 20 percent of the time with the allocated area and the remaining 80 percent in central HR, it means pooling and drawing together resources to provide innovative solutions to organizational issues.
7.3 The Skillset Needed
We have already discussed (Section 1.5) the skill set needed to work as a matrix consultant. In addition, there are some key competencies that are essential if the person is going to be a successful business partner.
Innovation and creativity
Calculating and producing financial benefit presentations
Mastery of key management processes
Understanding and being able to use Business Process Re-engineering tools
Workforce Planning
These are critical competencies in addition to being a competent HR professional. When interviewing for this position, the Company ran an assessment center to test all of the above.
7.4 Some Examples of the Successful Work of a HR Business Partner
Downsizing and Rightsizing
Rightsizing is a very useful way to help the management rescope on how many people are needed—coupled with this would be re-engineering the organizational design. This can be done department by department, which makes the possibility of getting this done and achieving success much better. In a recent rightsizing exercise company staff costs were reduced by 20 percent.
Business Process Re-engineering
The HR Business partner will need to understand and be able to do business process re-engineering and to be able to work out the cost benefit. We do a one-day program that gives this transfer of skills.
Some basic facts—processes deteriorate over time and sometimes the reason for the process becomes lost with time. IT innovations always impact on processes but often we see the IT innovation with little if any change to the process, missing a great opportunity. This is explained in my 2017 book “HR Analytics and Innovations in Workforce Planning.”
With any process then being examined you should constantly question if the process adds value, whether or not it is relevant, or can it be scrapped altogether. Such an HR process to look at is Performance appraisal—in its present form, does it add measurable value?
Richard Branson of the Virgin group recently scrapped keeping holiday records, and the entire holiday system process. He had worked out that the cost of maintaining such a system had no significant financial benefit.
BPR provides a massive return on investment and it’s very straightforward measuring the financial benefits to the business. The HR business partner is in exactly the right space to be able to spot what’s needed.
Watching
You can learn a lot from watching what’s going on. A company in the Middle East had a request for 15 additional staff in their Operations functions. The HR Business partner had observed a number of factors that were affecting productivity. In discussion with the manager various alterations were made, resulting in only 1 extra employee being needed.
Critical Thinking
A large manufacturing company in Germany had received an order that would mean production had to move from 10,000 units a day to 15,000 units. The HR partner working with the production manager and packaging manager redesigned the workflow and by relocating employees between departments was able to provide the right staff in the right place at the right time to successfully meet the production needs.