Assessing HR Expertise

Author's note: Business officers who have responsibility for the human resources function have a vested interest in ensuring its effectiveness and alignment with institutional priorities. Since HR has multiple touch points—staff, supervisors, university leadership, faculty, potential candidates, and vendors—its impact is considerable, and its institutional knowledge is often broad and deep. Sibson Consulting has found that the most effective HR assessments are conducted proactively by HR or through a highly collaborative process with business officers.

Higher education is undergoing unprecedented change that is more rapid and complex than academia is accustomed to experiencing and that will continue in the foreseeable future. What has not changed is that an institution's mission to educate cannot happen without the collective, deliberate efforts and expertise of faculty, administrators, and staff. People remain the drivers of any institution's achievements.

As the leaders of the function responsible for handling workforce issues, human resources professionals have a unique opportunity to play a key role in leading organizational change, fostering innovation, and mobilizing talent to sustain or enhance the institution's reputation, operations, and culture. Given the investment typically required to support an HR organization and the cost of salaries, benefits, and other rewards of work provided to employees, it makes good business sense to maximize HR's impact on the institution.

How can HR make the most of its potential to add value to the organization? To be truly effective in driving and supporting the institution's workforce, HR must constantly assess the organization's needs and challenges, honestly evaluate its own capability to support those needs, build staff competencies, and demonstrate the agility to adjust as institutional needs change.

The first step is to conduct a rigorous diagnostic of the institution's expectations and its HR needs followed by an honest assessment of how well the HR function meets those expectations. This type of gap analysis must be performed before any changes can be made. Structure, staffing, systems, and metrics should then be developed to support the direction established for HR. What follows are suggested steps for undertaking this important evaluation.

1. Understand the people issues associated with the institution's strategy, and evaluate HR's role in contributing to the strategy. As HR professionals know, the HR function cannot succeed in a vacuum. To work effectively with the institution's leadership, HR professionals should understand the implications of its strategy on its faculty, administration, and staff. It must identify the means by which it can support, facilitate, and drive the accomplishment of the institution's business goals. This includes deepening its knowledge of the issues and challenges facing the institution and higher education in general and looking outside the traditional HR lens for opportunities to add value.

Questions to ask:

• Which jobs and functions are mission critical? Which are basic but essential? Which no longer meet the institution's needs and should be restructured?
• What type of talent is required to accomplish the institution's objectives? Does that talent already exist internally? Do we need to buy it or grow it from within?
• How can HR support the provost's office in issues related to faculty?
• Do we have a culture that will draw the talent we need to attract, engage, and retain?
• What barriers does HR need to overcome? Are some so deeply entrenched that HR will need to work with or around them?

HR's traditionally transactional role has become more strategic, multidimensional, and complex. Certainly executing transactions and ensuring legal compliance are essential practices, but those are only the basics. To truly add value and drive excellence, HR must build its credibility with the institution's leaders. Doing so requires being able to speak their language, to understand what keeps them up at night, and to look beyond traditional roles for opportunities to develop creative solutions. For example, HR has traditionally had little if any role in faculty pay benchmarking, which is usually handled by the provost's office or institutional research. Increasingly, HR leaders are reaching out to offer insights, guidance, and analytical help in this essential work. In the process, they are building partnerships with academic leaders.

For HR to understand how it can most effectively begin influencing change, it is important to know how faculty, administrators, and staff—including the HR staff—perceive the HR functions, its programs, and its service delivery. This requires asking tough questions about how stakeholders value HR's work and what they need now and in the near future. This insight will give HR the information it needs to build its credibility as a business partner.

Once HR staff understand the institution's perspectives, they can take a hard look inward. Staff need to evaluate what is being done, how it is being done, and the value-add and efficiency of its transactions. In the end, efforts to become a strategic partner and trusted advisor can succeed only if the basics are handled efficiently, accurately, and expeditiously.

2. Identify and prioritize HR's service delivery and offerings. Strategic HR begins with impeccable execution of the basics and flawless service delivery—that is, getting processes and services right and making them quick and efficient. Without this solid foundation, HR will struggle to establish credibility as a knowledgeable business partner and a change leader. The means by which services are delivered and each of the major functions of HR should be examined for their impact on achieving institutional strategy. Administration and technology, reward systems, career and performance management, training and development, and employee relations must all be assessed.

Questions to ask:

• Does HR understand how its customers perceive its service delivery? Does it know what needs are unmet? Do the customers know what HR can truly do for them?
• Does the service model enable HR to truly understand the issues facing its client groups?
• To what extent are the major functions of HR organized to respond to the unique needs of high-impact segments of the workforce? Does HR try to be "all things to all people"?
• What structures, systems, processes, and practices need to change?

3. Develop and implement HR mission and strategy, structure, staff, and services to support the institution's strategy. Once HR understands what others expect, where it currently stands, and what it needs to do to become more closely aligned with the institution's needs, it is time to focus on the HR function and build a framework for success.

Steps to take:

• Develop an HR mission statement and a strategic plan that aligns with broader institutional needs.
• Brainstorm the functions and services HR needs to provide, what can and should be outsourced, and what is no longer necessary. For larger institutions, determine if those services can or should be provided centrally or within the academic and administrative units.
• Develop the organizational structure to deliver those services. Establish role descriptions and skill and competency requirements. (Strategic HR is not only about what is accomplished, but also—and as important—how it is accomplished.)
• Identify and prioritize any positions that should be added and begin to build the case for funding those positions, either immediately or over time.
• Align staffing decisions with role definitions. For example, a major research institution recently defined its HR leadership roles to better respond to increasing globalization. The institution is creating programs in a variety of countries and sending faculty and staff on international assignments at a rapidly accelerating rate. It could not afford the time to build expertise internally, so it targeted its search efforts on HR professionals in large multinational corporations—in effect, "buying" the technical expertise.

4. Build a scorecard to measure HR's effectiveness and progress towards meeting its objectives. It has become essential to measure HR's effectiveness, not only for its own planning purposes but also to demonstrate to leadership how HR adds value and contributes to the institution. The right set of metrics can help HR understand whether it is effective in achieving its goals and start building a database to ensure that future actions are effective.

That said, measurement for the sake of measurement is not appropriate. Many HR metrics are already in play, but unless HR is measuring what is strategically important, the numbers are meaningless. Common metrics are "cost per hire" or "time to hire," but what do these reveal? Unless they are linked to overall strategy and are segmented, the information may be misleading. Consider a year when several key positions are in search mode. Both cost and time metrics will increase, but the ultimate value to the institution will be significant. A metrics scorecard should be developed to reflect the HR strategy and key indicators that the institution values. Metrics should be relatively constant over time to build an understanding of progress but should be regularly evaluated for continued effectiveness.

Traps to avoid:

• Limiting the metrics to what is currently measurable and trying to get metrics perfect out of the gate rather than understanding this is an iterative, learning process. As institutions enhance their enterprise management systems, more and better data will become available. Proactive institutions do not wait for perfect or complete data. A private institution recently created a metrics scorecard to measure the effectiveness of its new performance management system, leaving "placeholders" for metrics that are not currently available. This will keep its priorities in the spotlight without holding up the measurement process.
• Using external benchmarks as a requirement for measurement or as a baseline for tracking success rather than the institution's own priorities. External benchmarks are best used as a source of information rather than a model to strive for.
• Developing metrics without the involvement of leadership.
• Connecting metrics to financial or quantitative outcomes only. Qualitative outcomes are essential but can be more challenging to measure. Returning to the "cost per hire" and "time to hire" example, since high-quality hires who are effective and engaged is what most institutions strive for, this would be an ideal metric, although it would be challenging to collect the data. Consider conversations with hiring managers, division leaders, and incumbents; review key performance indicators for the job, the function, and so forth. Supplementing quantitative with qualitative metrics will provide a more complete picture.
• Treating metrics as a program rather than the way HR manages its function.

These are exciting times for the human resources profession within academia. Increasingly, institutional leadership understands the potential for HR to be a trusted, strategic advisor. HR professionals have an opportunity and obligation to step up to the challenge.

Karen Hutcheson is a senior vice president at Sibson Consulting, specializing in HR consulting to colleges and universities; e-mail:khutcheson@sibson.com.