Consulting Playbook: Building Modern HR Practices and How That Impacts Your Organization
The Consulting Playbook, Edition #5
Every business is a people’s business at its core. How you organize and manage your talent is essential to the health and the growth of your organization. Let’s have a look at some issues and top practices defining a modern and effective HR department.
The Demands of Global Growing Talent Needs
The organization referenced is a Global Holding Company operating designing and manufacturing air & space parts and vehicles that boasted a large workforce: > 150,000 FTE, with 25% engineers, and comprised of 5 main operating companies. The organization is among the leaders in servicing the Aviation, Aerospace and Defense industry. They have completed a major research project on the topic of “How to organize for growth in the Aerospace and Defense Industry”, and this research had specifically outlined improvements in the HR functions within a corporate environment.
HRD together with the Executive Committee had identified serious HR issues which had to be resolved on a Group level. The organization needed to recruit 5,000 engineers additionally in very specialized domains (composites, structures, propulsion). Other major areas of improvement included managerial culture, creating a sense of ownership, and establishing carrier bridges across the group of companies.
Corporate Business Academy Designed to Support New Initiatives
The Consultant developed a close working relationship with top HR team members (Group HR function + HRDs of operating companies) with an agenda to define HR priorities and create a blueprint of new strategy implementation. He also performed an analysis of the present organization’s structure at Group level, and in the operating companies to be able to determine commonalities and overlaps (interviews and benchmarks), and assess function and performance. During the design sessions with HR top team alternative design options were discussed and further revised. Corporate Business Academy was organized and prepared for launch. The role of the newly established academy would be to build and support the newly designed managerial culture of the Group HR process redefinition: candidacies, recruitment, evaluation, and training.
The Impact on the Business:
- Established a common vision and action plan for Group HR functions
- Refined the HR priorities and roadmap to implementation
- New Resource allocation processes were outlined including Performance Management/KPIs, Key processes
- Setup of a common improvement platform for all non-transactional processes (pay, time, non-specific training)
- New HR Business Partner model was implemented across operating companies
- Corporate Business Academy set to become a key factor of the Group culture
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Additional Information
Effective Reorganization Methods for a Modern Global HR Operation
A modern and dynamic HR department has a tremendous impact on the business performance of any organization. As companies grow and their needs in qualified talent rises on a global scale, the demand for a progressive HR operation becomes even more ardent. If this component is so crucial, we had identified the key HR competency as following: familiarity with integrated talent management, understanding of workforce planning, and competency in social networking and new HR technology.
The Top 5 HR Practices that Can Make an Impact on Your Business:
1. Structured Governance and Business Case Development. In order for HR to best serve a business and build a successful business case, a close working relationship with the business leaders is a must. This will serve as foundation to understand the inner workings of the company, and involve the management in the planning process. It will also foster the full alignment…
2. Developing Advanced Workforce Planning Capabilities. Leading HR organizations today incorporate elaborate forecasting and workforce analytics into their processes. This enables them to apply company-wide talent, latest business data and external workforce data into practical insights that they can share with business leaders.
3. Implementing the right HR Philosophy – Leading HR organizations tend to commit to creating work environments enabling employees to thrive both as individuals and as a group. They clearly communicate expectations, the HR philosophy and mission, and actively engage in creating a positive environment. Innovation and collaboration, or creating the best place to work are their top priorities, while the least effective HR philosophies limit their focus on efficiency or cost-cutting efforts.
4. Reducing administrative work for HR Business Partners. A HR organization represents the link between the HR function and business leaders, a high-impact HR organization is able to advise senior business leaders on decision support, workforce planning, leadership development and executive coaching. Delegating the project to the right person, improves HR’s credibility across the enterprise, enhance working relationships with business leaders, cultivate mutual understanding and gain more influence. Poor performance in this area and narrow focus on administrative duties only, can actually reduce an HR function’s ability to work effectively.
5. Flexible HR Organization Design. Leading HR organizations are flexible and agile. Their structure allows adaptive movement when conditions dramatically change. Centralized, decentralized model or a combination of the two, emerged as a predictor of HR success. Flexibility of the model is an important and valuable feature allowing an organization to adapt changes, and continue to grow and thrive.
For further reading:
– Reviewing the Functions of Global Human Resource Management
– The global and local HR function
– Challenges for human resource management and global business strategy
About The Consulting Playbook
Hélène Laffitte is the CEO of Consulting Quest, a Global Performance-Driven Consulting Platform and author of “Smart Consulting Sourcing”, a step by step guide to getting the best ROI from your consulting. With a blend of experience in Procurement and Consulting, Hélène is passionate about helping Companies create more value through Consulting.
