How can an HR partnering model add value?

The role of an HR business partner is to act as a consultant to senior management to help align the business objectives with employees and managers. They are often referred to as employee champions and agents of change. The relationships that HR business partners build with employees is fundamental to positive change in the workplace, ensuring that teams are happy and motivated by the organisation’s vision. 

An HR partnering model can add tremendous value to any organisation but one size does not fit all when it comes to this approach. As one of the world’s top universities embarks on an ambitious change which will see the organisation through to its 200th anniversary, we caught up with the senior people partnering team at King’s College London. During our interview, we discussed how the HR partnering model can add value and deliver a return on investment within a diverse and complex organisation.

In order to add value, HR partners must have an in-depth understanding of the drivers and ambitions of the organisation, as well as the contribution that it makes to its environment and the world around it. In addition, they must be aware of the changing nature of the external factors that affect the organisation, and how these might impact the people who work there. When an HR team has this knowledge, they can effectively identify the opportunities and risks of making changes to the business, and ensure that people are at the centre of any strategic decision making. 

Employees tend to have a strong personal affinity to the organisation and their ambitions, and it can be argued that the “psychological contract” between the employee and the organisation can sometimes hold more weight in discussions around change than a financial one, which includes their salary, pension and other financial benefits.

Many think of the obvious transactional measures such as time to hire, cost per hire, employee turnover and absence management figures, however, this often only tells half the story. If an organisation is looking to change the way that it engages with its people and the wider world, there are far more qualitative questions that need to be taken into account:

Certainly, the quantitative measures mentioned above can prove informative in answering these questions, but influencing behaviours and capability should take as much precedent as the numbers.

Both the HR team and the business must have a clear and mutual understanding of who does what, and when business partners will get involved in management decisions. If a business partner can find an effective balance between over and under-reliance on HR to make these decisions, the model can truly add value in the areas that require specialist input and knowledge.

In order for business partners to provide the best service to stakeholders, the wider HR function must be in a fit state to support it. This includes transactional HR services and centres of expertise that can continuously evaluate and develop its service offerings so that the business partners have the time, information and specialist resources to enable people-centred change.

As mentioned previously, business partners must have an in-depth understanding of what the organisation wants to achieve and the external factors that can influence and challenge these objectives. What goes hand in hand with this knowledge, is the need to be visible within their business areas and build trust with their people, so that they can enable them to make the link between their organisational objectives and their people plans. Once all of these elements are in play, partners should have the cultural and political awareness to navigate even the most complex people issues with their stakeholders.

Essentially, having the right number of people, doing the right number of activities, at the right pace for the organisation. This can be an ever-changing and quite contentious topic for many HR teams, so making sure that the function is adequately resourced and agile enough to respond to changing demands is vital to ensure the function supports the organisation in the best way. For King’s, the ambitions and goals of the 2029 vision are over the next 11 years, however, the building blocks to the transformation paired with rapidly changing external factors mean that the pace of change is often quicker than some expect.

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