In my recent post I already mentioned that for me the next evolution of HR is outstanding. I am deliberatly speaking of HR and not the HR function or department. From my perspective, just taking the HR department into account when speaking about HR tasks and responsibilities is short-sighted and no longer viable. In addition, I believe that the HR departments as they exist today need to split into separate, specialized departments.
But step by step: Before thinking about New HR, the requirements and challenges today as well as tomorrow need to be explicitly debated – New HR should be applicable at least for a decade to really offer sustainable value for todays businesses. And debating starts with understanding who are the customers of New HR?
Basically, since Ulrich has performed his evaluation of HR’s customers, not much has changed – however, the importance of the different customers has changed. Therefore, examining the different customers, their requirements and challenges builds the starting point for New HR.
Back in Ulrich’s times and the same is true for today, HR’s customers are:
– Management
– Shareholder
– Customer
– Employees
– and in many countries and many industries: works councils and unions.
1. Management
Let’s start with Management, starting with the Board, down to Teamleads. Each employee with leadership responsibility has to be counted into this category. But of course, this makes the diversity in this group big and of course the different levels of leadership positions have different requirements for HR, need different HR services.
Top Management requires strategic as well as operational HR support. It needs a true and capable HR player, not only partner (like Ulrich used to say), who is capable of advising across the complete menu of HR. This advisor role is of course future focussed (strategy) as well as based in today’s business (operations) – but in any case beyond a company’s workforce.
Just below the top management level, the mid-level leadership team also requires HR support. This is less strategic and more operations focussed – but still not to be mixed up with transactional. This is the layer that puts strategy into practice – and this requires people. Typical HR support here is Change Management or Journey Management or Organization/ Workplace Design.
And last but not least there is the Teamlead level. These are managers that often don’t see themselves as Management – however, they do lead teams and have to form those teams as effective as possible. In addition, this is the group that has to mainly deal with employees, their careers and demands on a daily basis.
Current HR models do not entirely answer these requests in theory, and in practice mid-level Management and Teamlead support is often non existent.
New HR has to deal with these requirements and find cost-effective, efficient answers. In my next post I will debate Sharholders as the next customer group of HR.
Chief HR Officer 