Business challenges don’t fall neatly into HR specialisms

Our specialisms in HR can limit our thinking. Let’s take talent retention – if you’re in Reward, you’ll see it as a pay and benefits challenge; if you’re in L&D, you’ll probably see it as a line manager skill issue.

You might develop separate interventions. They’re all valuable, but could deliver far more if they’re connected. When you add in the end-user insight of the HRBP, your programs are more likely to land well and be embedded productively.

When HR teams come together, and bring all their skills and experience to bear on a challenge, they co-create powerful, integrated solutions that deliver value.

Let’s take that a step further, and pick a business challenge – let’s say, increasing profit by reducing costs. Retention clearly plays into that. Regrettable leavers cost organisations up to 2x salary (ref research by McKinsey & Company, SHRM and Deloitte) so it’s relatively easy to calculate a cost that will get the attention of your business leaders, and win a budget for the work you want to do.

This is an important reframing – we create an explicit link between HR’s work and business priorities.

In our work with HR teams, we achieve results along three key threads:

• Building HR’s understanding of the business and what drives success;
• As a result, creating a path to more strategic partnering, and
• Pulling the whole HR team together to share, collaborate and deliver more with their precious resources.

It’s great for HR’s reputation too.