The strategic role of HR

Hewitt Associates recently released new research which showed that the HR function is still not seen as a strategic force within organisations. Robertson Cooper’s Ben Moss was asked to review the research for HR Director Magazine and to explore the implications of the findings for HR Directors.

The article focused on the impressive range of business level outcomes that HR Directors own or strongly influence and the extent to which these could be leveraged by HR Directors for strategic influence. For example, HR has a major role to play in delivering customer satisfaction, attraction and retention of the best talent, reduced absenteeism and organisational citizenship. However, none of these outcomes is the specific responsibility of any of the units that make up an HR department. This puts the onus on the HR director and his/her team to see beyond functional silos and to create a vision of how to deliver business level outcomes that cause the rest of the Board to sit up and take notice.

The example used to demonstrate this in the article was well-being, which can bring major bottom-line benefits to the organisation through several different routes – including delivering on all of the outcomes mentioned above. However, in most organisations no single person has overall responsibility for ensuring that all the benefits of well-being are realised across the business. The Occupational Health or Health and Safety manager may be responsible for meeting HSE guidelines on stress, but he/she is not responsible for delivering the benefits that well-being can bring on an organisational basis – that is, people in these roles don’t have a budget for improving organisational citizenship or customer satisfaction by increasing well-being. Equally, Talent Managers don’t have a budget for improving well-being in order to improve retention rates.

This is why the role of ensuring that cross-cutting factors like well-being are managed in a way that delivers real business benefits ultimately falls to HR Directors. They are often the only people in a position to deliver these outcomes and when this happens it becomes much easier for HR directors to have real influence in the Boardroom.