systematicHR

The intersection between HR strategy and HR technology

It always frustrates me when I’m dieting – I have to forego one of my favorite food items:  Butter.  Butter (fat) along with bacon fat (fat) is one of those amazing joys of life.  When butter is great, a bit salty, a lot smooth, and a lot fatty, it is a wonderful thing  Unfortunately, one cannot generally eat butter straight off the spoon without incurring some ridicule from friends.  Therefore, one must also eat bread.  To me, bread is not just a necessary evil.  Great bread on its own is also a joy of life.  It can be beautifully crusty on the outside, warm on the inside.  But sometimes when the bread is not great, it’s just a delivery system for the butter.  Perfect harmony ensues when both the bread and butter a great.

HR service delivery (you knew it was coming, don’t roll your eyes) is quite like bread and butter.  Imagine your HR business partners as the bread and butter as amazing data and insights.  When the HRBP is great, you have a wonderful partnership of a person who actively gets to know the business, builds great relationships, communicates, plans and collaborates effectively.  Unfortunately, the HRBP is often paired with crappy systems, inaccurate data, and poor reporting capabilities.  The business wants a partner, but they also want a partner that can help diagnose what is going on with their people.

Butter on the other hand is like great data.  When systems and data are in good order, access to reporting and discovering insights become possible.  Insights into the organization and people don’t mean anything  however if all you have is some people at corporate that don’t have relationships into each business segment.  Data and insights get lost in the fray, lost y the wrong people, poorly communicated, and otherwise rendered meaningless.

Just as you can’t eat butter straight (again without incurring ridicule), you need a good delivery system.  That’s the bread. In this case, the delivery of the insights can’t even be consumed without great HRBP’s.  In a prior consulting firm that I worked for, we used to have a line at the bottom of each powerpoint that said something like, “content should be considered incomplete without contextual dialog.”

We’ve been so caught up in data, big data, business intelligence, predictive analytics that we’ve been on a quest to spend millions of dollars to fix all of our foundational data systems.  In a few years, we’re hoping to deliver amazing insights into the organization.  Pair processes with real time intelligence that allows managers to know exactly what actions to take with people.  I’m the downer guy to tell you that without the context of the great HRBP who understands the business, 80% of that cool data analysis is meaningless.  You don’t get insight without understanding the business – all you have is a cool analytic.

That poses the second problem.  Do we actually have great HRBP’s?  The analysis of that has been done in many other places, but the answer for the vast majority of us is “no.”  We’re spending millions of dollars on the data, but we still have not figured out how to transform our HRBP’s.  I’m not saying they are the HR generalists they were 10 years ago, but they still don’t usually have the full trust of the business, the ability to make business, people, financial, operations… correlations, and they still don’t understand the business the way they understand HR.  We still have work to do here, so realize that we can deliver the data, but whether we can make it meaningful is still uncertain.

In our quest for great data delivery to the business, let’s not forget that it’s the pairing of two great elements partnered effectively together than makes the data meaningful.

(this post was made possible during the consumption of some pretty good bread and butter)
(I thought about using “meat & potatoes” but I’m not quite as passionate about that)

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