CAHRS Working Group HR for HR: Best Prac ces for Developing Both Your HR Prac oners and HR Func on

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1 CAHRS Working Group HR for HR: Best Prac ces for Developing Both Your HR Prac oners and HR Func on May 19, 2015 Marlborough, MA Author s Note: Given the disparate nature of the items discussed during this session, the notes are organized along the lines of Topical Areas rather than the chronological order of what was said in the meeting. Opening Comments The day began with a welcome from Steve Rempe from Boston Scientific and Steve Miranda from the ILR School of Cornell University. The group then began discussions in a variety of areas associated with the topic of HR for HR. On May 19 th, 2015, CAHRS Managing Director Steve Miranda facilitated a day-long Working Group (WG) on the topic of HR for HR. The session focused on what various CAHRS organizations are doing to improve the quality of their own internal HR teams. The WG was held in Marlborough, MA and attended by 18 individuals from 14 CAHRS partner and guest companies. These included Accenture, American Express, Boehringer Ingelheim, Boston Scientific, Ingersoll Rand, Johnson & Johnson, JP Morgan Chase, Macy s, Mastercard, Microsoft, Protective Life, Shell Oil, Tyco International and the ILR School of Cornell University. In General, What Sorts of HR for HR Programs Are You Currently Finding to be Effective? 1. Focusing on the creation of a development culture within HR wherein there is an explicit expectation that each and every HR professional in the organization continually grows and develops his/her own skills, whether via officially offered programs or through ideas that the individual brings back to his/her manager (i.e., to make development a self-initiated activity with personal accountability rather than a corporate program). 2. Putting both money and time into a program which is increasing the ability of selected HR professionals to coach line leaders. This has yielded a significant increase in the reputation of HR in the organization. However, one of the key learnings during the early days of this program was the realization that not all members of their HR team should be coaches. For these individuals, spend your investment dollars on other skill development initiatives. 3. Taking well understood non-hr programs (e.g., six sigma, lean process engineering, project management skills, etc ) and specifically modifying them to apply to the HR function. One of the major challenges when doing this is how to take methodologies which focus on the analysis of standardized processes and apply them to situations where the data is often non-standard in nature (i.e., leadership development, succession planning, etc...). 4. One of the painful lessons one partner learned on a major project was that the assumption that HR professionals would be better than the general population at managing and accepting change was wrong and as a result, he had to take a step back, remove some individuals from the program and improve the change management skills of others. 5. One partner shared that her company has only now started to understand that while training our HR staff in particular areas is critical (e.g., process quality management, six sigma, etc ) it s even more important to assign these newly trained individuals to a project as quickly as possible once the training is over. This allows the individuals to immediately practice their new skills as well as get a positive vibe about the benefits of the training out into the larger population. 6. One partner shared that one of the best core programs his organization ever deployed was one focused on understanding processes. The specific areas covered were process mapping, root cause analysis and Ishikawa fishbone diagrams. This has allowed the HR team to become much better informed about how the business

2 Page 2 operates as well as start to understand what levers to study when trying to drive organizationwide change. 7. Multiple partners indicated that they had developed an organization-wide framework for diagnosing client issues and had insisted that all HR professionals use only this framework. Having a consistent approach across the enterprise allowed them to identify those issues that exist more broadly across the organization. It also gave the HR team and business leaders a consistent vocabulary for working through issues. Some of the models/vendors used included the Prosci ADKAR (awareness, desire, knowledge, ability and reinforcement) model as well as the Robinson consulting model. How Have You Approached the Question of Measuring the HR Organization s Effectiveness? 1. One of the major challenges one partner company faced was changing its HR culture from one that measures processes to one that measures outcomes, with a major focus on showing how HR is doing more while costing less. 2. For several areas (e.g., Service Centers and Centers of Excellence), it s easy to show effectiveness or improvement because of the presence of multiple operational metrics which are similar to metrics seen in the business (e.g., mean time to fill a recruitment recommendation, employee attrition rates, etc ). Partners are challenged by the creation of metrics around the more strategically focused work they do (i.e., leadership development, succession planning, etc ) 3. One partner started off by measuring operational metrics for various HR processes. Her company has since moved to assessing where members of her HR team are on the development of skills against the company s HR competency model. One of the areas that companies need to watch out for when they do this is how to get agreement between manager and employee when they baseline the individual s competencies. This partner had a lot of issues because employees thought they were much further advanced than did their managers. 4. One of the things to watch out for is to ensure that you re not accidentally focusing on metrics which drive seemingly good short-term behaviors while simultaneously resulting in bad longterm outcomes. One example of this was focusing on the diversity of a candidate slate while not looking at the long-term success of diverse candidates hired. 5. If you are going to baseline your employees against a competency model, it s important that you have very good descriptions of exactly what constitutes poor, fair, good and excellent levels of performance against a particular competency. This is so employees have a firm understanding of exactly what performance at a particular level looks like. 6. There was general agreement that almost no time was being spent on the topic of the ethical use of data. Given the explosion of both internally and externally available data, there is a growing concern that organizations are not fully thinking through the ramifications of how this data is used as it relates to career-impacting decisions on individuals. 7. There was uniform agreement that high-potential rotation programs were very valuable for the development of HR professionals. About half of the attendees had high-potential mid-career rotation programs (average length = two to three years) and half also had entry-level rotation programs (average length = one to one-and-one-half years). One of the frameworks the groups found especially interesting for programs of this sort was skill development, self awareness, and professional mastery. 8. The various partners in attendance took different approaches when it came to telling people the

3 Page 3 potential job level the employee in question could reach. Some shared this information while others did not. 9. One of the partners has a program where you must demonstrate your competency within a specific timeframe or be asked to leave. The evaluation is done by your supervisor, a second supervisor who is familiar with your area of responsibility and a third outside supervisor. 10. One of the partners has started to migrate from hiring individuals with Masters in HR to MBAs. While the initial results look promising, it s too early to know if this will result in a long-term change to the recruiting strategy. 11. An observation was made that the HR function does not appear to send its own high potential folks to MBA or Executive MBA programs with the same frequency as other Corporate Center functions (e.g., Finance, Research & Development, Information Technologies, Marketing, etc ) There was no consensus to explain this phenomenon. 12. There was also consensus that while HR serves as the process champion for cross-organizational rotations, it was very unusual to see HR Directors or Executives rotating into non-hr functions. 13. One company has decided that it will focus the majority of its full-time staff on more strategic HR issues. As such, the following have been outsourced: United States benefits administration, Payroll, Learning & Development management (not strategy), and Human Resource Information System data entry. However, outsourced or not, HR is still responsible for ensuring that various operational targets are met for the processes for which they are responsible. What Sorts of Learning & Development Programs Have Worked/Not Worked For Your Organization? What Have Been Some of the Challenges You ve Had to Overcome? 1. One partner initially decided to use internal experts to develop her HR team s change management model but this did not work out as well. The company then went to having external experts on change management utilize a train the trainers approach. This worked much better. Currently, internal staff uses an external change management model to help business leaders work through various challenges. 2. Another partner decided that it was critical for new HR professionals to have a strong understanding of what was important to his various organizations, both from a business perspective as well as an HR perspective. She therefore created a two-and-one-half day cultural orientation program for all new HR hires. At this session, all new HR hires from around the world meet together in one location with storytelling being used as the primary communication strategy. This approach helps people to quickly grasp what we stand for and, in the long run, makes the implementation of global programs much easier to accomplish. 3. Another partner concluded that different parts of the business have very different needs as it relates to HR support. Some partners only require operational and compliance expertise, while others require significant amounts of change management and organizational design support. The organization has therefore adopted a model where the HR folks who are assigned to various business units receive very different skill training. 4. One partner shared that he makes very different types of L&D opportunities available to people depending upon the specific needs of the business unit they are supporting (i.e., Are they in growth mode? Stable? Shrinking? Etc ). This partner also employs a variable costing model for HR expenses where there is a fixed initial cost for a given set of HR services and any requests the businesses make above and beyond this core set of deliverables is paid for by the business.

4 Page 4 5. One of the questions several of the partner companies are struggling with is whether shadow staff should be included in any L&D initiatives that are launched by HR. The group was of two minds on this, with one indicating the business should be paying for the shadow staff s training and the other sharing that getting more people onboard with the program made downstream deployment much easier. 6. Another dimension that must be considered is when a specific country has a major regulatory or legislative change that requires the revamping of multiple HR processes (i.e., European Economic Community in Europe, Asean Economic Community in Asia, etc ). In these situations, it s critical to get training resources in place as quickly as possible in order to ensure that the company is not being put at either reputational or financial risk. 7. As some partner companies look seriously at combining various areas into multi-function service centers (e.g., HR, Finance, Information Technology, Facilities, etc ), the question of what training to deploy is becoming more of a challenge given the wide variety of needs within each functional area. How Has Your HR Organizational Structure Evolved Over the Past Few Years and How Has This Affected the Way You Think About HR Development? 1. All of the partners present were organized along the traditional lines of Human Resource Business Partners, COEs and Shared Service Centers (SSCs). However, the relative percentages of HR professionals in each of these categories varied widely amongst those in attendance. 2. For those partners who had 50% or more of their HR population classified as HRBPs, the majority of their L&D programs for this population focused on: a. Consulting skills, b. Business knowledge targeted towards the specific BU being supported, c. High-level organizational development concepts and frameworks, and d. Skills required for HR generalists. 3. For those partners who had 20% or less of their HR population classified as HRBPs, the majority of their L&D programs for this population focused on: a. Teaching the organization who does (and is responsible for) what (both in the businesses as well as in the broader set of corporate centers); b. Relationship development; c. Communications; d. General consulting skills; and e. Detailed organization effectiveness and change management skills. 4. Regardless of the various organizational designs, the following were consistently viewed by the group as areas of Strategic HR: a. Succession planning, b. Workforce planning, c. Organizational design, d. Organizational productivity, e. Coaching at both the individual and organizational level, and f. Change management.

5 Page 5 How Were You Thinking About Differentiating Your Training Across Your Various HR Functions? Not all, but the large majority of the partner companies in attendance shared that they had begun to adopt a customized approach for the training of the HR staff. The type and amount of customization was dependent upon the HR function the particular individual worked in. Some of the approaches discussed were: 1. For SSCs: a. Focus on sharing of the corporate strategy during on-boarding, b. Very specific technical training on software applications, processes, etc, c. Training on how to help managers with both self-assessments as well as the assessment of their employees, d. Analytical skills (e.g., HR metrics, process management, etc ), e. Collaboration and customer service, and f. How to baseline, benchmark and improve processes and customer service. 2. For COEs: a. Given the very different needs, develop a customized plan for each specific COE; b. Utilize external training much more in these areas than in other areas (e.g., SSCs and Human Resource Business Partners); c. Several partners are using external certification programs because staff feel that this is a commitment to their development that stays with them regardless of where they are employed. For those organizations that are using external certifications, one critical question to deal with is how getting or not getting the specific certification might impact an employee s documented competency level or annual performance rating; d. Some organizations are looking at internal certificates as a supplement to external certifications; and e. Badging is also becoming more and more popular with organizations as a way to show career progress for various individuals (as opposed to a change in title or a promotion). 3. For HRBPs: a. Focus on client-facing training (e.g., diagnostic skills, consultative skills, critical thinking, customer satisfaction management, etc ); b. The ongoing development of business acumen continues to be very popular but done in a very different manner depending on the level of the given HRBP; c. Case-specific training; d. Dealing with ethical dilemmas in a global environment; e. Effective problem solving frameworks; f. Relationship development; g. Effective networking; and h. Effective verbal and written communications. Are You Seeing Any New Trends or Have You Made Any Changes to the Way You Manage Relocations For High Potential HR Staff? 1. The majority of the partners indicated that they are having across the board difficulties in getting high-potential HR leaders to relocate. 2. Many of the issues are for staff in the US but several of the partners are also starting to see

6 Page 6 hesitation in the more stable (i.e., better developed) markets. 3. The partners also saw differences based on both national and generational demographics, with non-us Generation-X and Generation-Y professionals being far more willing to relocate than US Gen-X and Gen-Y professionals. 4. There was consensus that getting folks to relocate out of developing and/or emerging markets was not an issue. However, it was offset by the challenge of finding a large enough role for them to move into when they rotated back to their home countries. 5. One partner company shared that, due to costs, the company has decided to cap all expatriate assignments at three years. 6. Another shared that if an existing expat wants to stay beyond the agreed upon period, he/she needed to move onto the local payroll and benefits scheme. 7. Another shared that her company has one set of relocation benefits for standard relocations and another set of benefits when dealing with hardship or hazardous locations. Her team also thinks long and hard before deciding to expat anyone into a desirable location (e.g., Paris, London, etc ). 8. About two thirds of the partners present shared that a global rotation was expected for someone who aspired to rise to the level of executive within the company. The other third indicated that no such requirement or expectation existed. 9. One company has every employee indicate one of three possible choices related to personal mobility: a. Fully mobile, b. Mobile with constraints, and c. Not currently mobile and an associated documentation of timing. 10. Several of the partners in attendance indicated that in spite of the large number of societal changes, special challenges still existed for female transferees to other countries. These ranged from spousal support networks to putting the other partner s career on hold while on assignment. 11. There was a split amongst the partner companies in attendance as to whether technology, high levels of telepresence, and/or extended business trips were sufficiently robust to give an individual the same level of understanding as actually living in a non-home country. Not surprisingly, almost all of the individuals who had never worked outside of their home country believed it was while all of the individuals who had lived for an extended period of time in another country did not.

7 Page 7 This Summary Report was prepared by Steve Miranda for use by participants of HR for HR Working Group. The Center for Advanced Human Resource Studies (CAHRS) is an international center serving corporate human resources leaders and their companies by providing critical tools for building and leading high performing HR organizations. CAHRS mission is to bring together Partners and the ILR School s world-renowned HR Studies faculty to investigate, translate and apply the latest HR research into practice excellence.