Well, it has been some time since my last post. Sorry about that. But I also used the time to further reflect on the fourth customer: the employee.
When Dave Ulrich was designing his model, the employees, their values and expectations were very different from today. Many things have changed:
- The new Generations are very different than the one’s back when Ulrich wrote his piece
- The expectations from employees but also from employers to their employees have changed
- The talent landscape has changed dramatically – from a “buyer” to a “seller” market
I believe that employees are one of the customers that HR professionals are not surprised to see here. But before going into the details, let me pause and raise a different question: Is the employee really a customer of HR? – it seems odd to ask this question, but with my recent post about real Talent Management I have already touched this topic. I honestly believe that the people manager is the first point to go to for each and every employee. That is why it is called people manager. This is what leadership is about – but (and this is an important but) HR has to a) enable these managers and b) there are still a few other tasks that stay with HR and the Talent Function.
From my perspective employees have three general needs when working for and in a company:
a) They want to get paid
b) They want to have a great job and enjoy work
c) They want to get developed and succeed
So, for a) clearly the HR Admin function is responsible. This is a commodity and should be handled through self-services and a pure admin function.
b) is more complex. There is clearly a combination of people manager and HR necessary. The people manager is responsible for the day-to-day job and experience, but HR should have a look at the overall working environment with policies (yes, although this topic is “out” it still is necessary – in some countries and industries more than in others…), workplace design, organization design, etc.
c) is again a mixture of people manager and HR. The day-to-day development again should come through the people manager. But the strategic, cross-functional development needs to be not only enabled, but executed through HR. HR are the only ones that really understand the complete Talent landscape of the firm and can “follow” Talent inside and outside the company, but also blueprint potential career paths through the firm as development, experience and succession paths. The people manager of course should have this in mind as well, but is generally not in a position to grow Talent cross-functional or even across a current functional deployment.
Back in the days when Ulrich started his model, most of above mentioned (except the payment topic) were “nice-to-haves”. Today they are MUST HAVES – and if you cannot deliver on those, Talent will make its decision to leave. And this is what you don’t want in a market of scarce talent… – or at least you want to make sure that Talent comes back as well. And to enable this in a proper way, today’s HR function is not prepared. I haven’t seen many HR functions that really play well in the talent space. There are some that have a great start, but an integrated concept strategy and structure is so far missing and NEW HR has to step into this.
But, this is only part one of employees – there is a part two which is often not reflected in HR: future and past employees. I will further elaborate on this topic in my next post.
Chief HR Officer 