The Hr Value Proposition
HR TRANSFORMATION WITH A VALUE PROPOSITION HAS SIX IMPLICATIONS • Five: HR professionals need to acquire the knowledge & skills necessary to link HR activity to stakeholders value. • When HR fails to make it, it allows gaps to occur between Hr practices &stakeholder demands.
The HR Value Proposition by Dave Ulrich and Wayne Brockbank. The essential message of this book is very simple: Human Resources (HR) must deliver value.
HR practices must create value in the eyes of investors, customers, line managers, and employees. HR departments must be organized – implement strategie s that create value by delivering business results in efficient and effective ways. The HR Value Proposition offers an integrated approach to what HR professionals and departments can and should do to create sustained value. The target audience for this book is HR professionals everywhere in the world.
Since value is defined by the receiver, not the giver, any value proposition begins with a focus on receivers, not givers. It requires that HR professionals focus less on what they do and more on what they deliver. Often, HR professionals go straight to their desired results, without paying enough attenti on to the perspectives of others. When HR professionals begin with the receiver in mind, they can more quickly emerge as full strategic contributors; add greater value for stakeholders; enhance business productivity; achieve measurable and valuable results; create sustainable competitive advantage. The HR value proposition groun ds HR and has five elements that form an integrated HR blueprint: external realities, stakeholde rs, HR practices, HR resources, and HR professional s.
HR actions inside a firm must reflect and influence such business realities outside that firm. Knowing external business realities makes it possible to put HR practices in context, tie them to competitive challeng es, and relate them to concerns facing line managers. The realities that influence business today may be grouped in three categories: technology, economic and regulatory issues, and workforce development. Technology drives almost every aspect of the changing business environment. The major trends in technology fall into four dimensio ns: speed, efficiency, connectivity, and customization. To contribute to management team discussion about technology, HR professionals need a knowledge base about the current technological possibilities and a general vision about the future role that technology might play in their firms.
HR professionals need to be aware of the basic trends relative to economic and regulatory issues and know where to find them. For example, such important factor as workforce productivity shows that in recent years productivity per worker has increased at twice rate. Also, HR professionals need to bear in mind that since the mid- t o late 1980s, trillions of dollars of. Economic activity has been deregulated and this trend toward deregulation is expected to continue. Workforce demographics that influence the pool of labor available to conceive, develop, produce, distribute, and sell products and services are changing in turbulent ways. Five categories of demograp hics trends that are most relevant for business decisions: declining workforce growth, increasing age of the workforce, changing gender balance, increasing ethnic diversity, and deteriorating family economic health. Demographics directly influence the demand for types and volumes of products and services.
With this knowledg e of, HR professionals may then add value to strategic discussions about any of three major trends; understand how each of trends influence their firms directly and indirectly; align their HR strategies and practices to HR’s key constituents in a timely and accurate manner. HR is successful if and when its stakeholders perceive that it produces value. Delivering what matters most to stakeholders focuses on the outcomes of HR rather than on the activities of HR. The authors distinguish external (investors and customers) and internal (line managers and employees) stakeholders and present specific ways HR professionals can deliver value to them. To be more efficient HR professionals should blur boundaries by integrating what happens in the organization with what customers and investors experience outside it. HR professionals should be linked to organization capabilities that build intangibles important to investors and also supported a customer value. For internal stakeholders the book provides approaches how HR professionals can identify and create organizational capabilities required for line managers to implement strategy; and also how HR can add value for employees by encouraging individual knowledge, skills, and abilities that promote productivity and help ensure long-term employability.
To assess the alignment between HR activities and the requirements of stakeholde rs, the authors provide an organizatio nal audit. HR professionals must be fully literate in knowing how HR can add value for investors, customers, managers, and employees. With an understand ing of t hese issues, HR profession als can become active players and partners with business leaders, and they can begin to develop human abilities and organizational capabilities that enable a company to compete now and in future. HR practices must be defined and must evolve to deliver what stakeholders expect. Four domains of HR practices that follow the flows or processes central to organization success are offered: flow of people, flow of performance management, flow of information, and flow of work.
Flow of people and flow of performance managem ent are more related to traditional HR practices such as staffing, t raining, development, appraisal, rewards, and feedback. The book presents how these practices can be designed and delivered to add value for each of the key HR stakeholde rs; and how HR professiona ls can adapt. Best practices to their individua l situations. But HR professional s need to devote their attention to two additional areas as well: the flow of information and the flow of work.
These emerging HR activity areas have great impact on the human side of the business and value to stakeholders. These practices areas include the management of internal and external communication and design. The authors discuss action planning, offering templa tes to help HR professionals implem ent the choices for new practices and track the progress in impleme nting the choices practices. The HR function must create strategies and organize resources so that individual efforts of HR professionals combin e to create value.
In this part of the book authors identifies specific steps and actions for designing HR strategy so as to link and integrate the various stakeholder requirements, business strategies, organizatio n capabilities, and HR practices. As an example, book shows how Motorola’s HR professionals created a more powerful strategy using these steps and achieved success in implementing this approach. Based on the scale and scope of their products and services, firms set themselves up as single business, related and unrelated diversifications, or holding companies. To fit into t hese structures, HR generally assumes on of three patterns: HR functional organiza tion, HR shared services, and embedded HR.
Then the book offers alignment of different business organizations and HR organizations and reviews tips for creating each of the three HR organizatio ns, with greater focus on shared service. Shared services divide into two parts: transaction work and transformation work.
Transactiona l work of HR can be organized through service centers, technology, and outsourcing, while t ransformatio nal work can be organized through centers of expertise, dedicated HR, and corporate HR. The authors also provide the reader with accurate responsibilities of HR professionals and line managers in the context of a shared service organization. HR professionals deliver value through the roles they play and the competenci es they demonstrate. They need to master new roles to add value and competitive advantage. There are different roles that HR professionals can play but the book allocates five most important: employee advocate (employer-em ployee relationship is reciprocal), human capital develop er (build the future workforce), functional experts (designing and delivering HR practices), strategic partners (help line manage rs reach their goals). No one plays all five roles to the same degree.
The Hr Value Proposition Pdf
Depending on where to work in company, different roles have primary and secondary importance. It is not enough just to play particular roles, HR has its own set of competencies that professionals need if they are to maximize the value they add for key stakeholders. The authors provide the results of global survey, which allocates five main competencie s: strategic contribution, personal credibility, HR delivery, business knowledge, and HR technology. Also, this survey shows how HR effectiveness of these competencie s influences on business.
The international best seller Human Resource Champions helped set the HR agenda for the 1990s and enabled HR professionals to become strategic partners in their organizations. But earning a seat at the executive table was only the beginning. Today's HR leaders must also bring substantial value to that table. Drawing on their 16-year study of over 29,000 HR professionals an The international best seller Human Resource Champions helped set the HR agenda for the 1990s and enabled HR professionals to become strategic partners in their organizations. But earning a seat at the executive table was only the beginning.
Today's HR leaders must also bring substantial value to that table. Drawing on their 16-year study of over 29,000 HR professionals and line managers, leading HR experts Dave Ulrich and Wayne Brockbank propose The HR Value Proposition. The authors argue that HR value creation requires a deep understanding of external business realities and how key stakeholders both inside and outside the company define value. Ulrich and Brockbank provide practical tools and worksheets for leveraging this knowledge to create HR practices, build organizational capabilities, design HR strategy, and marshal resources that create value for customers, investors, executives, and employees. Written by the field's premier trailblazers, this book charts the path HR professionals must take to help lead their organizations into the future.
Ulrich is a professor at the University of Michigan School of Business and the author of 12 books and more than 100 articles on the subject of human resources. Brockbank is a clinical professor of business at the University of Michigan School of Business, the author of award-winning papers on HR strategy, and an adviser to top global organizations.