Thursday 9 November 2017

#cipdace17 blog 6 - session E3

After another too short break I’m back in another session. This time it’s about Connecting HR, Finance, Operations and Business Leaders, with HR acting as an organisational facilitator to help the organisation achieve its shared goals. 

This will be my final blog from today as I have some work matters to attend to this afternoon and won’t be attending the afternoon sessions. I’ll do a summary blog in a few days though with some wider observations on the whole event. 

Graham Smith from Devon, Cornwall and Dorset Police started off. The two separate forces are due to merge and he had a challenge to bring together two different organisations from a people perspective. He highlighted the Daimler Chrysler merger as one that failed because of an underappreciation of the cultural and people dimensions of such transformational change. 

Andy Boulting, Assistant Chief Constable, took over at this point and explained how HR act as facilitators in things like workforce planning. 



I liked this figure of 8 approach as it ensured all parts of the business are included in workforce planning, and that there are strong links to organisational vision and takes account lots of different supply and demand factors. The HR practitioners have to have the right skill set and right level of trust and empowerment to be able to make this all work. 

Interesting though that on this plan, analysis of supply comes before analysis of demand, and I think this is something many organisations get the other way around. They can be led by demand, and then work on matching supply to it without having first got a real handle on what supply looks like and the volumes therein. 

Gill Quinton from Buckinghamshire County Council then spoke about collaboration across professional disciplines. Her role now encompasses more than just HR and that gave her a unique perspective of how HR could and needs to work with other functions to improve the organisation. 

She ran through Bursins HR Maturity Model and described each level within it to outline what is required from HR teams at each level. She feels that HR needs to do a few things to drive organisational effectiveness: customer focus, business acumen and simplicity. 

I agree with these three things. HR teams that I’ve had experience of have usually had one or two of these three and we have worked hard to develop the third, but it’s been a different gap in different teams in different organisations. 

But, as Quinton pointed out, HR can’t develop and be excellent at these three things on its own. They need help and input from IT, Finance, and business leaders. True collaboration is required. 

This was an interesting case study in how to encourage and develop collaboration and one that is also relevant to current challenges I face. 

Now it’s lunchtime...

Till next time...

Gary




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