I, like many others in the HR field, am curious about the roles of an HR Business Partner.
Below are the roles extracted from
What is an HR Business Partner? for discussion purpose.
Hope current HR Business Partners can chip in on the reality of the role locally.
Strategic Partner
Aligning HR and business strategy: ‘organisational diagnosis’
In many cases, this is the only hr business partner role HR people think of. The person “at the table.”While important, this is no larger than the other HR business partner roles.
This HR professional understands business strategy, and that strategy is about trade-offs, and choices. They also have a significant understanding of how their organization operates and how the firm generates value.
They help provide perspective to business changes, and evaluate the business case for impacts to employees (good and bad). How changes to talent management can help in achieving business objectives.
Administrative Expert
Reengineering organisation processes: ‘shared services’
McKinsey once wrote that “re-designing and organization is one of the best uses of a CEO’s time.”
Bain & Co studies 57 restructurings and found that the common element to successful restructuring was improving the ability to make decisions.
Having an HR professional with skills in designing organizational structures, processes, and the jobs within them can greatly improve productivity giving your organization a competitive advantage.
Employee Champion
Listening and responding to employees: ‘providing resources to employees’
This isn’t just listening to employees.This is actively working to improve employee engagement and to develop key talent.
My favourite definition of employee engagement is a measure of employee’s discretionary effort. Engaged employees are more productive. In modern business, this means efficiency and competitiveness.
However, discretionary effort alone won’t help your organization succeed. This is where talent development is key. HR professionals in the employee champion role help maintain employee engagement, and ensure that the right employees are developing the right skills that the organization will need to remain competitive.
This can be management and leadership skills in a large organization, or customer-service skill development, or even instilling a culture of continuous improvement within your organization.
Productive skilled employees are the backbone to an organizations success, and this role is critical to accomplishing that.
Change Agent
Managing transformation and change: ‘ensuring capacity for change’
Anywhere from 50-70% of organizational changes fail, and many times they fail because the people don’t change. Systems or tools get successfully created, but are never used.
Getting the people to change is one of the most difficult things to accomplish within an organization (in fact, my employer PwC has an entire group just called People and Change who support organizations undergoing changes).
Successful change is vital to an organizations ability to adapt and compete, and having HR professionals who understand this, and are involved in organizational changes can make a significant difference.