Strategic HR Business Partner: What It Is and Why It Matters

 

Introduction to the Strategic HR Business Partner

HR business partners play a pivotal role in understanding the people-related challenges experienced by organizational leaders and providing tailored solutions that address them.

This program is for HR Professionals looking to take their role and team to a new level. It's time to move beyond managing administrative processes and start shaping processes instead.

Strategic Planning

An effective HR business partner must understand and translate the strategic directions of an organization into effective initiatives and steps, supporting company goals at all times.

HRBPs must possess an in-depth knowledge of their company's core functions, how the various business units interact and work within organizational charts, cultural awareness and understand different labor laws and business practices.

They should also be capable of identifying key human resource trends and issues and developing recommendations on how these can be resolved. Furthermore, they must create long-term HR plans and strategies that support an organization's objectives - these plans may be short or long term depending on business needs.

HRBPs must possess excellent stakeholder management skills in order to meet this objective, including effective communication between different groups within an organization such as employees, managers, and senior leaders; building consensus through consensus building; and successfully negotiating agreements and settlements with third-parties.

HRBPs must also utilize data analysis and other tools to plan for the future, whether this means identifying employee skills and interests or anticipating succession needs.

Execution

HR business partners need to be adept at working with various stakeholders and understanding all facets of a business in order to offer solutions that align with company goals. Furthermore, they should use data analysis techniques in order to measure effectiveness or measure impacts of existing strategies or new ones.

An effective HRBP will assist managers in understanding the bigger picture. They might use performance issues as an example to demonstrate how they can add greater value by addressing root causes rather than immediate effects; for instance they could say, for instance: Jan is having problems in her role because your department hasn't hired the necessary candidates for key roles, I can look into why your hiring process is failing and provide solutions.

Making the transition to business partner can be daunting, particularly for an HR team overburdened with administrative tasks and lacking management buy-in. A well-trained business-savvy HRBP can assist in this effort by showing its value and advocating for it; additionally they may enable managers to handle more tactical aspects of their jobs more independently during this transition process.

Monitoring

The HR business partner's responsibility is to oversee all aspects of human resource function efficiently. This involves reducing costs, aligning human resource goals with overall company strategy and making sure policies are being adhered to and followed correctly.

To do this, the HRBP must be capable of collecting and interpreting usable data. No longer can HRBPs rely on gut reactions alone - instead they must understand what's happening within the business, where managers stand currently and how they need to change in order to enhance performance.

For this task to succeed, much strategic work and crisis scenarios must be conducted. When responding to a pandemic outbreak, for example, HR business partners must understand its impact on employee attendance and engagement before creating and communicating appropriate policies across their organisation.

Strategic HRBP approaches have an enormous effect on their performance, which is why it is vitally important to assess their work. Personio offers all-in-one HR software solutions designed to give an overview of team productivity and performance allowing HRBPs to see where improvements need to be made and suggest modifications accordingly. Get in touch today to discover more of our HR management and people management solutions!

Evaluation

HR business partners need to be able to assess the effectiveness of their own strategies, by assessing their current state, determining whether it's working, and taking appropriate actions (whether that means amending original strategic goals or setting new ones). To effectively do this, they need to have the ability to analyse data and make data-backed decisions.

Finalizing an evaluation by applying its lessons effectively requires making a concerted effort by both evaluators and stakeholders to use its findings for improvement of practice or meeting organisational goals. Evaluators must take care to identify potential uses early in the evaluation process, then look out for opportunities to promote them further. 

Furthermore, to avoid time and resource wasteful wasting all questions asked must be prioritised for answers rather than providing broad coverage - an evaluation design must focus on answering only certain queries from all stakeholders posed to it; otherwise wasted efforts would result in answering everything asked of it - saving both parties time and resources!

Human Resource Business Partners often struggle to take a more strategic role due to the sheer volume of work they need to do. An HRBP could spend 19 hours handling employee issues per week and an additional 16 on day-to-day operations, making them unavailable to focus on more strategic activities. Therefore, HRBPs need to become adept at using technology and automation for streamlining processes allowing more time for strategic activities.