The world of HR is an interesting one, and if you would not think so, you probably would not read this blog. It gets more interesting day by day. The speed of change only knows one direction, the reliance on employees (the main focus of HR’s work) is increasing every day in almost every industry or region. But also the resource “employee” and especially “right skilled employee” is decreasing and will turn (or has turned in some regions and industries) from a buyers to a sellers market. There are many more trends that currently impact the HR department and its work. And HR as a function is finding itself in a constant Transformation – and is constantly supporting the Transformation of the business.
When speaking HR Transformation what is really meant in more than 90% of the cases is the transition towards the so-called Ulrich Model. In my more than 10 years of HR Consulting and research I have not found any company anywhere which does not take the Ulrich Model as basis for its HR Transformation.
Based on this popularity you might think that the Ulrich-Model is widely researched and studied. And actually there are many studies about HR in general, also in Germany. But most of them are a) not research based or b) focusing on the HR department in general and as a whole. In addition, non of these studies are doing much more than just assessing the status quo without really questioning the reason for that.
In my PhD I have started to fill this gap by researching about HR employees in Germany. About their skills & capabilities, about their views on “what should HR stand for” as well as their job satisfaction. And as promised to all my participants in my empirical study, I would like to provide a brief overview on my results and implications of those results.
But before going in there, I would like to again thank all of you tremendously for your support – only through your participation, I was able to finalize my doctoral studies, but also find out more about the state of HR in Germany – and this is an interesting picture as you will see…
Skills & capabilities
In the skills & capabilities research of my thesis I have focused on understanding the skill-set of HR employees which is necessary in the Ulrich-Model and which makes an HR employee successful in the Ulrich-Model. The results of this I have used to empirically assess and compare the actual skills & capabilities of HR employees in Germany.
The results are surprising. First of all, there is no big difference of skill set between HR employees working in a non-Ulrich-Model HR department and HR employees working in the Ulrich-Model. This is surprising as the necessary skills are very different. Unfortunately for the Ulrich-Model and its success, the general skill tendency in my research population is towards the necessities in a non-Ulrich-Model.
The traditional important skills like knowledge of labor law or educational backgrounds are still the most common and present. However, the majority of the participants have a skill set that is not too different to the one Ulrich “needs” – just that the actual skill level is very low. And this not only very low compared to what was identified by Ulrich as “needed skill level”. In fact, very low compared to HR employees in other countries. This might be surprising, however when diving into a) the educational background of HR employees and b) the current options on what one could study in Germany to prepare for a career in HR, this becomes obvious.
Only 20% of my study participants do actually have an educational background in HR – this means that 80% don’t. And of these 80% around 40% have a pure economic background. This is the majority of participants. Additional 30% have a background in psychology or law. This raises the question if HR is a profession at all, if more than 80% of participants do not need to prepare for working in HR. I know, this is a bit sarcastic, but also mirrors the view of many people about HR “it is not a profession and everyone can do it”. I don’t want to offend any of my friends in HR – in fact, I am very happy that so many people with such diverse backgrounds have found their way into HR. This can only enrich the practice and the various HR departments you are a part of. However, if the necessary munition is missing, it is not easy to perform at its best.
But even if any of these HR practitioners wanted to acquire the necessary skill set, it is not really easy to achieve this in Germany. This is the next difficulty. Having a look at all HR related studies or programs – both before starting a job as well as additional qualification programs when you are already in your job – it appears that the Ulrich model plays a rather unimportant role in these. There is no learning experience that provides you with all necessary skills or is providing you with the overview on “how” the Ulrich model is supposed to work at all. Important skills like the “Organization Designer” or the “Strategy Architect” cannot be acquired by any of the learning experiences that I found. Moreover, most of the learning courses offered for HR practitioners are providing experiences along the traditional, administrative focused HR model.
I would like to use this opportunity to clearly raise awareness to the need of such programs. How should an HR practitioner be successful if he or she won’t be able to acquire the right skill set? – this is a topic that needs to be worked on, starting at the universities!
Diving deeper into the study results on skills and capabilities, it becomes apparent that there is a big difference between roles. My findings say that HR Business Partners have the closest fit to the necessary skill set whereas CoE employees have the least fit. This as well was a surprise to me as the CoE roles are the closest to traditional HR expert roles and the HR Business Partner role the new addition from Ulrich, not present in the traditional model. I don’t have an explanation for that – my data do not suggest any significant difference between these groups of participants – not in age or in tenure, not in educational background. Further studies have to be undertaken to find out about the reasons behind.
What should HR stand for?
The 2nd part of my empirical research was about “what HR should stand for” – as the HR reasoning between the traditional model and the Ulrich model is so different.
To begin with, let´s have a look at Ulrich´s understanding of ´the client´. For him, there are 4 equally important clients of HR: Management, Employees, Shareholders, Customers. He emphasizes that these are equally important – and that especially HR with a traditional inward focused view need to understand and target the external clients. This is as any company’s ultimate goal is to satisfy its customers to make them “come again” and recommend the company to any of their colleagues/ other potential customers. And the best marketing instrument to support this are extraordinary good products – and these are made by the employees of the company. To now motivate and target internal employees to satisfy the needs of external customers, HR needs to understand what it is that external customers value and like.
Now, my findings show that the internal clients of HR (employees and management) are seen as almost equally important (in fact very important) – but external clients (shareholders and customers) as significantly less important (in fact neutral, not even important).
I expected this result as it shows where HR in Germany is coming from – an internal focus towards management and employees as well as being a more administrative function. However, this is a major difference and an additional aspect which makes the Ulrich model in Germany less successful. My observation as well as recommendation is that HR as a function needs to open itself further up – towards business but also towards external clients. Getting out there and understanding what the company is actually doing/ selling/ etc. – understanding and also talking to external clients can be revealing (in fact has proven to be revealing for some of my clients that have started to do so) and support you in your daily HR work.
In addition to customer orientation, I surveyed goal orientation. Results here are very promising when it comes to the Ulrich model. All goals (strategic, administrative, employee-focused, change-focused) were rated more or less equally important, no significant differences could be shown. All were rated important to very important. I was very happy to see these results (although they speak against my hypothesis). They should encourage all of us as they clearly show that HR practitioners (you) have taken on the challenges that Ulrich and his model brings. In the traditional sense of HR, strategy or change was not rated important – nor were HR asked to participate really. For Ulrich these two are the two factors that make the difference from being reactive to being an active player in the business arena – which we all want and should strive for.
Job Satisfaction
The third aspect that the empirical survey focused on was job satisfaction. The theoretic reasoning for researching also job satisfaction is that if a) you are not good at it (Skills & Capabilities) and b) if you don’t agree with what you are doing (What should HR stand for) you are not happy with it.
Well, the previous chapters have shown that a) significant skills and capabilities are missing to support successful job fulfillment and b) there is a goal congruence, but a target group discrepancy.
My results on Job Satisfaction show that participants are actually happy with their work, but unhappy with the organization/ structure of their work. This is interesting as it means that participants probably accepted and like the type of work they are doing (especially Business Partners), but are not happy with the actual set-up and organization of the work – meaning the structure of BP – CoE – Services. In addition, participants working in a non-Ulrich-Model are significantly happier with the organization than Ulrich-model participants. I quite frankly did not expect such a differentiated picture, but am really happy with this result and accented statement.
For me it shows that all of you are still passionate about HR and willing to give your best every day (this is fantastic and all your employers should be happy to have you), but that you see shortcomings in the actual structure and organization of your work. That you don’t feel that the environment provides a supporting structure to bring HR to a success. Of course, this can still be root-caused in the relatively new/ fresh transformation into the Ulrich-model. However, participants “living” the Ulrich model already for more than 1-2 years do not differ in their assessment. So it seems as if there is a systemic structural issue – interestingly, this is not too far off from my theoretical examination of the Ulrich model (see further below).
Conclusion
Now, the conclusion of this needs to be differentiated between practical implications and theoretical implications. In short, the theoretical implications are (and this is no surprise as this was the first study of this kind in Germany) that further research is necessary to fully understand the state of HR in Germany. This broader research has identified interesting themes as well as found aspects which were not expected beforehand. Additional research would be very helpful.
On the practical side though, the implications are clearer:
- It needs to be worked on the right qualification programs for modern HR practitioners! The complete program, starting from Berufsausbildung, through university programs towards additional qualifications is today not ready to support a modern HR department and the modern HR practitioner.
- HR practitioners should be more outgoing – visit your companies clients, read what shareholders have to say and let this influence your HR methods and programs. It will for sure result in better, more targeted and therefore successful HR work which will be realized by your business clients as well – and will therefore also support your career and reputation.
- There are systemic issues with the Ulrich model – at least in Germany. This should be looked at and corrective actions need to be taken. Empirically I wasn’t able to identify the reasoning, but please read on to find my theoretical view.
One last thing…
Until now, I was mainly focusing on presenting my empirical findings – as this was where you have all contributed to. But before I finish this page, I would like to spare a minute or so for additional observations.
When preparing for the empirical survey as well as when researching the Ulrich-model in-depth, I found out that there actually is a systemic shortcoming in the model – which I have neither seen solved in many HR departments: Ulrich has designed his model with (at least) three distinct roles – HRBP – CoE – Shared Services. These three roles/ entities are designed and set-up each by itself perfectly. But this is the issue – they were designed for themselves. The integration of each of the pillars, the combination, the reason WHY they should cooperate with each other – and should cooperate and focus on a higher cause (meaning not its own cause, but company success) was not looked at. The motivational basis for cooperation was not built into the system, but is essentially important for a successful HR department. This finding nicely matches the empirical findings that HR practitioners are happy with their job, but unhappy in the overall set-up. Therefore, what is missing and needs to be worked on both, theoretically as well as in most of your HR departments is the joined goal orientation – an answer to the question: Why should we all cooperate with each other and on what goal.
Form my point of view, this needs to be solved through different soft measures like re-strengthening group cohesion between the three groups, ensuring ONE HR goal, a performance management which targets HR as a whole and not each role by itself, as well hard measures like corrective actions around HR governance.
More on this very soon on this blog.
If you would like to find out more about the results, you can buy my published dissertation here, if you would like to discuss findings or share your view, please leave a comment below. I hope that you found this interesting and am looking forward to your view.
Chief HR Officer 