HR Business Partnering Program

About This Class

Business partnering is one of the most complex areas in HR and many organisations struggle to make it work effectively. This often provides HR with difficulty in developing the strategic role the discipline deserves and that our businesses require. Making business partnering work starts with understanding what it involves, and particularly what it looks like in practice, as well as its unique features in any one specific organisation.

At its heart, business partnering is fundamentally about understanding business needs and aligning HR activities and outcomes with these needs so that everything we do in HR is aligned with these business requirements. However, given the importance of people to business success, it is no longer enough to use people as a resource to implement business strategy. Instead of this, businesses actually need to create new people-based strategies.

The course therefore starts by painting a clear picture about what business partnering is designed to achieve and how it can succeed in doing this, pulling on thinking from Dave Ulrich and other commentators, and practical experience in different organisations. The training then moves onto strategic HR and especially the opportunities for creating new value for a business based upon what HR plans to charge with people and their organisation. The course then finishes with a deeper dive into the HR function, looking at how this needs to transform to enable the delivery of the above people based strategies in a way which is best fit for the particular business it acts within.

Local Fee

R 17,999

International Fee

$ 1,300

Book my seat

Download Brochure

Why You Should Attend

Participants will gain a detailed understanding of the following topics:

The approach, the role and the job of the HR business partner and the benefits these can provide
Approaches to being more strategic and improving impact and contribution within an organisation
Prioritising strategic activities and techniques for deprioritising other demands for business partners’ time
The range of activities available to use in being more strategic

The use of a simple but strategic framework for use in planning, measuring and analysing HR activities
Developing HR to deliver strategic, business partnering benefits
Project and relationship management in the HR business partnering cycle
Building credibility and transforming the business partner role in your organisation

Course Outline

At the start of the course, attendees will share their own situations and personal objectives and there will be time during the training to respond to these needs, bringing in additional content when required.

Throughout the course, the training will be based on a mix of input and ongoing discussion. The inputs will include research, case studies, models, frameworks and practical suggestions for attendees to take away. Where relevant, the training will focus on particular issues and opportunities in attendees’ companies to make the learning as practical and powerful as possible.

The training will also feature additional daily activities to probe deeper into particular topics and give attendees time to network, share experience and discuss opportunities with each other. Each day will also provide time to review learning and plan actions that attendees can take as a result of this learning.

Day 1

HR as a Business Partner

• The objectives and requirements for strategic business partnering
• Partnering as an approach which all HR practitioners can engage in, a role linking HR to the future of a business / business unit, and a job in a transformed HR function
• Ulrich’s conceptual and physical models, helping meeting needs for centralisation and decentralisation

Exercise: Day in the life of a fully fledged business partner

Strategic partnering with the business

• Understanding how HR provides value in a business: the value triangle and the value chain
• Being a business ally – developing business savvy and financial abilities to support alignment and provide credibility
• Making people management a true contributor to business success, being based on best fit vs best practice with resulting requirements for HR innovation
• Case studies from the technology sector: Microsoft, Cisco, HCL , IBM

Taking action to meet strategic needs

• Levers which can be used to improve the effectiveness and alignment of people and the organisation in meeting business needs, including workplace design and the digital workspace, in partnership with colleagues in Real Estate and IT
• New opportunities in recruiting, performance management, learning, and other areas of HR
• The importance of organisation design and new OD opportunities, supplementing use of functions and projects with communities and networks
• Managing, measuring, developing and rewarding the performance of groups rather than just individuals

Planning to meet and inform business objectives

• Increasing strategic contribution by developing, maintaining and implementing a simple but highly focused and strategic plan (the value matrix) which identifies how HRBPs intend to add and create value
• Setting objectives and identifying causal relationships at each step in the value chain at each level of value
• Using the value matrix for talent, workforce and succession planning
• Case study: McDonald’s – UK

Exercise: developing strategic people plans for participants’ organisations

Day 2

Identifying measures and conducting analytics to support the plan

• The opportunities and benefits of using measurement and analytics in business partnering
• Using a people and organisation scorecard to measure key business and financial impacts, people outcomes and the quality of people management activities
• Moving towards evidence-based HR by supplementing intuition with internal data, external benchmarks, and academic research
• Undertaking simple yet strategic descriptive and predictive analytics to provide new insight to
the business
• Using insights from analytics as a basis for reporting
• Case study: Financial Services company – part 1

Exercise: Identifying measures and opportunities for analytics in participants’ organisations

Developing a strategy to transform HR

• Linking HR transformation to the requirements of the people and organisation strategy
• Common problems and resulting opportunities to develop HRBP effectiveness
• The importance of organisational context, and of identifying and developing line manager capability
• Using HR principles to steer effective transformation
• Case Study: Takeda Pharmaceuticals

Structuring HR to enable the people strategy

• Changing the structure of the HR function, often involving moving from a team of HR generalists to the three legged stool of centres of excellence, a service centre and embedded ‘business partners’
• Making the structure of HR needs to follow the logic of the business, not just be dictated by a standard model
• The increasing diversity of HR roles and structures
• Impacts of increasing automation in HR service centres, new approaches in networks of excellence, and the resulting increase in the importance of partnering
• Challenges and opportunities in HR career development
• Case study: Financial Services company – part 2

Taking broader HR action

• Ensuring effectiveness of the HR organisation by developing other aspects of the organisation such as the culture, values, people and capabilities of HR professionals
• Why HR is not and should not be seen as a support function – within HR or from the perspective of another business leader
• Developing new capabilities and behaviours to underpin a more strategic approach
• Retaining a ‘One HR’ approach in a dispersed HR function
• Case Study: Central Provident Fund Singapore

Exercise: Developing and comparing options for the future HR function

Day 3

Project management in the business partnering cycle

• Planning and implementing change projects in a way which will optimise their benefits.
• The business partnering cycle and activities at each stage
• Enablers for managing projects
• Agile HR

Project management activity

Relationship management

• Creating and maintaining great relationships within HR and into the rest of the business.
• Enablers for managing and developing partnering relationships
• Using key insights from emotional intelligence and neuroscience etc. to inform the development of HR’s relationships
• Building support for HR business partnering with business leaders, other functional leaders, line managers and all employees

Influencing business stakeholders

• Intervening in relationships to influence perspectives
• Developing support for business partnering and strategic HR
• Building support for HR business partnering with business leaders, other functional leaders, line managers and all employees
• Case Study: QBE Insurance

Influencing activity

Action planning

• Prioritising best fit actions to take as a result of the course
• Combining strategic HR with existing activities when moving from a generalist model into HRBPs
• Responding to attendees’ remaining questions

Course summary, handing out of certificates & close

Who should attend

The course will be most relevant for senior and strategic HR staff such as those occupying the following positions: