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Professional Development
IS THE HRBP title thrown
around with true meaning behind it eroded?
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o one seems to quite remember the origin of HRBP as an HR role, but Dave Ulrich is known to have popularised it in the late 90’s. An HRBP is a strategic adviser to the head of a business. S/he has a critical seat at the executive table and takes the lead on people matters, in particular on how the business can optimise the contribution of its people in the rolling out of strategies that deliver competitive advantage. For an HRBP role, business acumen, strategic thinking and a keen understanding of the operation’s environment outweigh HR operations mastery. An HRBP doesn’t play in the transactional space but rather makes effective use of automation and self-service e-HR solutions. In large organisations, HRBP’s may also be supported by a centralised HR service which houses different HR specialists such as HR actuaries, psychometricians, L&D consultants and so on. Depending on the business, a unit head may wish to have an HRBP with some specialisation that is critical for the particular operation. To quote Matthew Mayol, a recruitment specialist, “HRBP was, in many ways, a revolutionary concept: the human resources professional who didn’t engage with procedures but with strategy; who delivered real value to the business, helping it both define and achieve its business goals.” The HRBP role of the future doesn’t veer too far off from the original concept. The problem with the HRBP title is that it has been used willy-nilly. It has either bastardised or watered down by assigning it to just about any HR official. This is evidenced, for instance, by a ridiculously-wide salary range and variants. On the lower side, Mayol recalls placing a candidate where the employer was looking for someone “who could become deeply involved in recruiting and performance management. But they also wanted that person to look after the monthly payroll.” In another example, the search was for a candidate who would be placed in charge of their own portfolio, reporting into a Head of HR. It was that head of HR, not the candidate, who would be responsible for partnering with the most senior leaders in the operations group.
PEOPLE DYNAMICS | January - February 2020
Neither of these examples typifies the HRBP role. Belia Nel, a Certified Performance Technologist from Improvid, agrees and defines the HR Business Partner of the Future. A Future-fit HRBP role
The HR Business Partner should be future-ready to optimise business in a challenging and changing environment. In the next decade more than a third of current mainstream jobs won’t need a human to execute. As Alan Hosking writes, “big changes are coming; they’re unprecedented in terms of their scope, impact and magnitude”. Researchers estimate that 70% to 80% of the current jobs will disappear in the next five to ten years or possibly even sooner. Jobs that are the most vulnerable are those of a repetitive or technical nature. The scarce skills of the future will be human skills. Human skills are those for which humans enjoy exclusive ability. In other words, skills that cannot be easily replicated by robotic or AI (artificial intelligence). So, notwithstanding AI and automation, human intervention will continue as a critical skill to do “problem sensing”. In addition to business acumen and facilitating strategic alignment of functions in the organisation, problem sensing skill will assist managers and business partners to sense a potential problem or sense the situational complexity of a problem. In the future humans will almost never be used to solve problems because robots will; however, our ability to sense a problem, will remain important. So the question is: is your role as an HRBP about to become extinct? And what are the implications? Are you providing more technical or transactional HR services to your organisation? Or are you adding business value by improving performance or “problem sensing” potential performance issues and deciding on the appropriate solution required – whether to be executed using human or technology? In the past, HR focused on helping business cascading the
