A New, Transformed Role For The HR Business Partner

good morning everyone today I'm going to talk to you about HR transformation a little bit and the HR business parter as many of you know we've been working on the systemic HR model now for almost two years and what we've essentially been uncovering and we talked a lot about this at our conference two weeks ago is the transformational change that's been going on in human resources from that of an administrative bureaucratic compliance-oriented function to that of an advisory Consulting data and systems function now it sounds like a big bunch of words but the real story

is that in this particular business environment which is accelerating in speed and more driven by technology and transformation than any time in my career we as HR professionals need to think of ourselves as the consultants and advisers on the people issues and the people strategies and the people programs that allow companies to flourish and grow and innovate and make money and that is completely different from filling out forms and submitting tax information to the government and making sure people are following compliance rules I'm not saying that stuff doesn't have to happen but you're going to

you're not going to get any credit for that anymore so in this journey towards this more evolved consultative function of HR we have to think about how we're organized now the organization models of HR for many years certainly when I got into it were centered around Service delivery time and cost of service delivery let's recruit people as fast as possible let's train people as cheaply as possible let's allow people to get their questions answered as quickly as possible you know and maybe along the lines we'll do some surveys and you know do some things to

make people happy and improve their benefits at the same time and that worked uh in the 1970s 1980s into the early 1990s but when we entered a war for talent and a labor shortage and a skill shortage and an engagement shortage and you know now a shortage of commitment in a sense from workers we really had to become more consultative now and the organization structures that were created to facilitate the service delivery years of HR were called centers of excellence where we took specialist roles and we put them into groups it turns out there are

400 job titles in HR and the number keeps expanding I won't belabor you with the details that's in the systemic HR research but we're in a profession that is expanding it's expanding in its breadth in it its scope and its importance so if you're not careful you're going to have a lot of specialist Coes you're going to have a diversity Coe you're G to have a pay Coe you're going to have an employee experience Coe you're gonna have a career Coe you're going to have an leadership development Coe you're going to have a general high

volume recruiting Coe you're G to have a Coe focused on early hires on people that are retiring you get where I'm going is that we built lots and lots of specialist groups in HR all of which had you know important roles to do important things and it got too complicated and many of them did tremendous work but now we have to stitch them all back together and in order to do that we have to create this thing we call systemic HR which you can read more about as you join our membership and many many companies

talked about it at our conference we actually had a lot of companies benchmarking themselves against each other in systemic HR and one of the Hallmarks of this more consultative or problem oriented HR function problem oriented meaning you can solve a unique problem as opposed to selling a solution or delivering a solution that was predefined is um this thing we call the business partner now you know I've read a lot of the books about business partners over the years and the business partner role and then they're old they're 20-year old books most of those ideas were

built around this idea of the function being a bunch of Coes and Service delivery groups and then the the business partner was a local professional who lived and worked in the business got to know the issues locally in the manufacturing plant in the retail stores in the different countries or cities or business units and just worked with Management on their issues and then served as an on budsman in a sense between the needs of those particular groups or those pods as they're often called and the Coes to sort of buffer the Coes from handling lots

of unique situations in different parts of the company kind of makes sense but it's a little bit of an overhead job if you think about it that way and so what happened was in the early days of business partners they were what were called generalists because they were General and they were pointers or administrative assistants to help you get access to the information or the services you need from different parts of HR you know if I want to change my tax withholding or uh I moved or I had a child you know I maybe I

don't know how to fill out the form or I can't find the right screen and workday I would just go to the business partner and say hey would you fill this out for me or tell me what I need to do well that's not a particularly high value job especially when we're going to add more Ai and make things even easier to do for yourself so what does this person do as we just um launched this week big piece of research on this generally what happens is we build little teams under the business partner and

the business partner becomes the local BP of HR for that business hereit and that person has a recruiting team under them an L&D team under them and maybe a few others Specialists under them now you've got a whole bunch of HR department departments and we actually did a project last year for a company that had two to three times too many HR professionals because they had built out all these little business unit Centric HR groups that were taking care of the needs of the local business Executives so that happens and and the business partner in

that scenario is a more senior job and those of you that become business partners aspire to those jobs because there those are little those are management or leadership roles and they tend to be mini VPS of HR and you learn a lot about the multifunctional aspects of HR but operationally it's very unproductive to do it that way um unless you can stitch these groups together because if you know the sales department in Germany needs a new hire program for I don't know some form of salesperson they're hiring and the sales department in Australia also needs

one of those programs and they're both run locally by those business partners you're not going to get any sharing you're not going to get any infrastructure sharing you're going to probably have a lot of duplication you're not going to get any learning Etc so we don't really want ideally in systemic HR the business partners to be VPS of HR that is an evolution that happens but really where we want to go is we want the Coes to be virtual and integrated and much more experiential in design we want to have package Solutions available for things

like sales training on boarding management development new hire new manager training and so forth and then we want the business partners to be consultants and so in the evolved companies the business partners are really like senior consultants and they oftentimes work in a pool they may be assigned to a given business unit but their job is not to replicate resources for that business unit but to learn what's going on in that business unit and diagnose the problem and share it with others to come up with innovative solutions and affect the rest of HR so the

rest of HR can lean in that direction and so there may be a need to create a special Coe or a pot of HR people for that business unit That's Not Unusual at all of course if you're a really fast growing tech company and you have 500 sales people and you're hiring another 500 more you probably need a sales training group you need a sales recruiting group you need a sales leadership group and so you know that group which may be virtual for a while would be led by this business partner but over time the

business partner works on other things and operates more as a Consulting resource than as a local HR leader which you know just really puts them into another in some sense bureaucratic role and you know now that we've got a chance to talk to a lot more companies about this and we've been through what MasterCard is doing what Lego is doing what some of the healthare providers are doing some of the big insurance companies this is a very powerful change very powerful now that leads to the question what is a consultant and you know most of

you in HR have had Consulting opportunities to do Consulting but you may never have been trained or really taught what Consulting is now we happen to have a really fantastic course on this in the Josh person Academy it's one of our most famous and most popular courses called the HR business partner or the HR consultant master class and Bill pelster who teaches it has been a senior consultant all around the world for most of his career and what what these roles look like in this more systemic model is very very good relationship people at getting

to know senior leaders under understanding the nature of the problems in detail not second guessing that the solution to the problem is something we already have because it may not be I mean I I used to laugh a lot when I was doing a lot of Learning and Development uh research that if you're an L&D professional the solution to every problem is training and yes every problem could be solved by training but it may not be the right solution to the actual problem you're facing even though it seems like training would help so what we

want to do as a business partner is really diagnose the situation clearly and then work within the rest of HR to bring the resources to bear from a pool of other Consultants who can Leverage The Coes and the Solutions in place to solve that problem and that solution may go on for months or weeks or years depending on what the problem is a great example of this was the Panasonic manufacturing case study which we've written up and actually they were at our conference where Panasonic being in the battery business which is a very fast growing

business was having a shortage of capacity by the way Tesla's having this problem a lot of companies are having this problem where manufact the semiconductor industry as the whole is having this problem where there's just a shortage of manufacturing ing capacity and part of that capacity is human beings it's Engineers manufacturing operations staff uh you know so everybody's trying to hire these people and because the skills are hard to find many of the people you hire are sort of trained but sort of not so they need to be trained on the process that goes on

inside of your company and you hope they're ambitious enough to learn a lot of new things in the process so it was going on at Panasonic as the batter demand was exploding and the manufacturing engineers and managers were hiring lots and lots of people so the business partner was working with the uh recruiting Coe to uh you know look at who was being hired facilitate the process try to monitor the impact and so forth and what she found out as a consultant was that just delivering More Humans in a faster rate wasn't really Sol in

the problem in fact what she did discover doing some analysis and using some data by the way with the help from some people analytics technology they had is um that they were over hiring they were there were so many new hires joining these manufacturing teams that there were people uh too many people on shifts the shifts were overstaffed a lot of them were undertrained and they had gone down the productivity curve of hiring I call this Talent density by the way uh Talent density which you can read about on the blog is uh this idea

that you don't want to overhire people that are undertrained because your quality of output will go down and actually the inefficiencies will go up and you'll probably reduce engagement at the same time so they were going through that problem but the managers didn't know that because the managers really felt because the manufacturing pressure that they needed more people to staff these shifts she found out through analysis uh of the output of different parts of the manufacturing lwn compared to the input of who was being hired that the shifts that had over hired were producing less

output because there was more training and there was more unclarity and bureaucracy so of course the problem was one of talent density but nobody understood that because most managers believe that if they can hire more people they can get more done but that's not true there's actually a very you know significant diminishing return on over hiring and sometimes you can overhire to the point that you get less done um that actually happens a lot but you wouldn't know that if you're an individual manager because you wouldn't necessarily have the data or even thinking about it

that much so she figured it out and after several months of analysis and working with the manufacturing group that she was part of part I think she's part of one pen major plan went back to them and showed them the data and given that a lot of these people are Engineers they they understood the data and they and they heard her and they they they they believed her once she had the right data and they sat down and change their hiring strategy and training strategy to build a more productive team she didn't need to have

a whole HR department working for her to do that I am convinced from the conversations that I have with many of you that these kinds of roles will be rapidly will be extremely helpful in many many parts of your company I mean let me just give you a sense of my life in a given day I may talk to two or three HR leaders in different companies and different Industries and they have lots of questions and things they want to chat about but usually there's something that's on their mind and they'd like to just get

my advice or they want to ask what kind of research we have or what we've done in this area and so they'll they'll throw something at me like uh you know one of the banks I interviewed a couple weeks ago told me you know our our our new higher turnover is way way too high would you please give me some advice should we be uh changing our universities that we Source from should we be changing our recruiting process what what your what is your gut sense of where we should be going and so I listen

to these conversations and because I've been around the block and talked to so many companies done so much research I can usually ask a few questions it usually takes about 15 minutes and we'll figure out what most likely the problem is not always but we can at least get into the r right range and sometimes the problem that I you know point out isn't really what they ask me about they asked me about a problem that seems to have a simple solution but actually the problem is a complet different area so for for example in

the case of this particular company I don't think there was anything wrong with their hiring at all actually I think their hiring was pretty cool from everything I learned about it but they had no concept of the first one to twoe Career early uh career program for these people they would come in to this company and they would be assigned to senior portfolio managers and other banking people and they would be given projects based on what that person needs and then they would be evaluated to see if they could stay and go on for other

promotions but those managers don't really know necessarily what to do with young people and they're not in a developmental mindset because they have lots of uh commitments they have to meet so the problem had nothing to do with recruiting actually it had to do with really the whole idea of what are we going to do with new people and and what's our on our new higher development strategy and how do we move people around and develop them quickly so they don't leave or get burned out their first year or two they're with us I mean

it didn't take me very long to to to figure that out but he may never have sort of understood that because he doesn't think that way because he hadn't had that experience that's what the business partner should be doing and then knowing the organization and knowing who's doing what and having a a pool of people to help he or she could amass a team to address that issue and believe me this is happening everywhere in companies all the time that Service delivery operation model for HR is actually getting in the way because we're being asked

to you know do the things we do faster and cheaper but we're not being asked to stop and reflect on whether the solutions we're building are the correct solutions for this particular problem we call that falling in love with the problem and that's really where the business partner role goes now we have spent a lot of time on this the very first course we built in our Academy back in 2008 was in was about the business partner so if you really want to get some help with this call us we have developmental programs we have

an architecture we can help you with skills models and training but you have to build this kind of capability in your company there are I guarantee you regardless of whatever size your company you're in there are people that want to have this kind of a career it's a very fulfilling career it's a great preparation for a much more senior role in the company I think business partners are people people in the in this model who should be rotated into and out of the company into more line roles so they have lots of expertise in the

operations of your company um they are it is a career path upward that doesn't require you to have a bunch of people working for you which there's not that many of those jobs in HR by the way so um it's a very fulfilling career so I wanted to give you that perspective today here it is coming on the summer solstice as I know a lot of You Are going to be thinking about this over the next year as we go through restructuring and flattening and Adoption of AI tools by the way this kind of a

role means that the business partner can be one of the big consumers and users of Galileo and tools like that and then rolling Galileo out to line leaders and others so the business partner doesn't have to just be a hand you know Hands-On consultant they can be a technology consultant they can get involved in data training AI things like that lots and lots of really important roles well I hope that's a good little uh 20 minute discussion for today uh we have a whole bunch of exciting announcements coming over the summer in the Josh person

Academy I won't tell you what they are yet but they're coming soon new courses and a whole new career experience for HR professionals and I hope you're having a great summer I know a lot of you are taking a little bit of time off and we will be around and hope to hear from all you guys and keep in touch we're starting the big reset again in another week or two those of you that haven't joined and would like to join reach out to us and we'll let you know if you're qualified um lots and

lots of fun stuff to do there thanks everybody have a great weekend [Music] [Music]