systematicHR

A couple of days ago I mentioned that HR organization design was a factor in overall business scalability, flexibility and agility. As the HR industry has started to move towards shared services and HRO (ok, started may be a mischaracterization as this all happened ages ago) most organizations have realized an economy of scale with data services all in one place or call center functions being centralized.

Organizations may be going with HRO for slightly different reasons. While many are pursuing them for the 3 competencies of this conversation, many others are looking for best practices that can be offered by a vendor managing processes for other large organizations. Certainly a data center and application selection from any of the large HRO organization provides scalability, flexibility and agility of a different scale that if one were to manage the applications in-house, but the outsourcing of certain functions also allow the retained HR organization to focus on the talent and workforce strategies that increase these three competencies.

I mentioned in part 2 of this discussion that the selection of HR technology could also influence HR organization design and thus impact these competencies. Certainly leveraging appropriate technology (good portals with employee and manager access) will offload work processes. However, well architected technology will also decrease overall maintenance and error processing. This allows your organization to increase productivity per headcount and be itself more scalable.

To end this conversation, I go back to the first post. Businesses are seeking to be more scalable, flexible and agile in the marketplace. To do this, HR organizations need to focus on the right mix of competencies for the organization, meaning all the talent, workforce and rewards strategies we love to talk about here. However, the foundational infrastructure of technology and process must be present. In order for an organization to be scalable, flexible and agile, the HR department must reflect these competencies, and in turn, the HR technology infrastructure must also reflect them