Canada
Speaker A Thinking of as an exploration. So really this is a little bit of a journey. So we'd like this to be a dialogue. We're going to propose some things. And we're actually stealing a little bit from Michael Rayner, our speaker, who opened yesterday, because we realized we were thinking along the same lines of making some observations and just sort of standing back and up and over this whole issue of a human resource function. And someone just said to me they'd never seen a model of an effective one, which I think there's all kinds of issues around human resources. So we wanted to step back and just do some observations and kind of examine sort of what is going on and why is that, and we've got some sort of implications around that and what is it that we can do to shift and change that, what are some resolutions? So we've got some propositions to put forward to explore. And I've always found it fascinating, this separation between business and human resource stuff, and folks just thinking they are two separate things. I've never understood why it's so hard to have them both in the same conversation and this whole thing about how to introduce requisite and my experience around all this stuff too. HR folks, if you sort of took all the different functions in an organization when you're going through some requisite implementation, HR is the group that seems to have the most trouble with really taking on the concepts and embracing it and endorsing it. So it's kind of an interesting phenomenon because they're also in the role to be able to do the most influencing in education and contribution around it. So there's a lot of interesting dichotomies to manage around this. So why don't we we thought that we'd start out with actually taking a look at what was observed, just to sort of center our conversation a little bit. Do you want to get the first slide up there? And we thought it'd be interesting to start with some of the classic HR models, actually, because I find that when I'm working with HR groups, they all reference these. But one of the things that struck both rich and I over and over again is that there is this phenomena that HR work at level four and level five is often not clearly articulated and not clearly understood. And I think that's a double whammy because I don't think it's clearly articulated or understood by the people who actually hold those roles. And then second of all, of course, the people that they're servicing and supporting and partnering with don't have any clarity about it either. So you've got this really interesting tension going back and forth where it'd be great if both could come to the table and work it out. And I think that's also where HR, the classic shoemakers kids phenomenon, kicks in too, right? Because often HR folks are so busy helping everybody else and working on everybody else's role clarity and all of this stuff. They don't take the time to actually get their own house in order first and do the work that they need to do around their own stuff. So, Rich, I don't know, what else do you want to say more about that?
Speaker B Does that feel right? Does that kind of fit with your own observations?
Speaker C That's a question, in my experience, that many organizations do not appreciate that there is such a thing as four and five.
Speaker B Exactly.
Speaker C And then even if they do, it is very difficult to find a qualified four level capacity person to fill the roles. And so you wind up with either a person who's not suitable for the role or someone with capacity, but really does not have the professional requirements that are now very significant and the right.
Speaker B Skills and knowledge in HR.
Speaker A Yeah, yeah. Rich and I worked on a yeah, we worked on an HR review together at a bank that we're both very familiar with. Won't say which one it was. And it was so absolutely glaring that there was this big vacuum at level five, not only in the articulation of the roles, but there wasn't the talent, like you're saying, the capability to fill those roles, just like this vacuous space. And it was quite alarming across all the different functions, actually. It wasn't appearing in one particular area or another. It was right across the board.
Speaker B Exactly. Yes. Should we be passing these around?
Speaker A Sorry.
Speaker B Thank you.
Speaker D Going back to the question in the first slide, I don't know if we take for granted, what is HR work? I mean, when you got the resourcing type of work, that, for my understanding, is HR as compared to what service delivering is that normally in HR role, you got both of them. And in that service type of work, it's hard to find level four and five type of work. Whereas in the other is mainly that.
Speaker A Type of work that leads perfectly segue into the slide.
Speaker E Beautiful set up, because we've been thinking about that.
Speaker B Why? What is it? First, let me talk a little bit. This is not the HR role, but we see this as what are some of the HR role relationships that take place so between HR and other areas. And I think, just as you've talked about, HR has a huge component of their work, which is straight service delivery. It is doing work on behalf of in support of the organization, so it delivers those to the various constituents. On the other hand, if we go up to the top of the top there, HR has a significant, I think, stewardship role. And to a large extent, that stewardship role has not been clarified terribly well, either by the line clients who authorize that stewardship, or by HR itself, who you often hear say, I don't want to be a cop. The reality is, if we got that clarity around HR that you are not a cop. You are accountable for protecting the assets called human assets of an organization and get that clarity across the various I think it would go a long way to elevating and supporting the type of work. And if you think of stewardship work that is more in the level four part of the organization, supporting authorizing, putting a stamp of approval on the work.
Speaker F If you add control and stop managers.
Speaker B I would be more happy control and stop? Yes, managers from doing a specific action because the CFO right, yeah, that's a good point. I would say all managers are also employees.
Speaker D Right.
Speaker B And the reason allow is there because I think HR often forgets that by doing nothing they are by default allowing something to happen. Right. So let's be crystal clear what the.
Speaker C Right is there and it's allowing illegal.
Speaker E Things to happen in interviewing processes.
Speaker F No, but it's not running a business unit with the wrong personnel and the wrong structure.
Speaker B And if they allow that to happen, HR should be not illegal and things.
Speaker F That'S one thing, but it's more the business side of it to come into HR.
Speaker B Right, I agree.
Speaker A Yeah.
Speaker B And then the middle one, of course, is just this is where the work of HR in the relationship with others to help enable build the right systems, processes, negotiate with others. What are those systems and processes that we need? So at times those things are not clear, not articulated well and not sanctioned by the organization. And I think that puts HR in a very difficult position.
Speaker A I was going to add a couple of things. So this brings me right back to your point, because I think a lot of this stewardship work enters into this whole realm of governance, which I think is just completely misunderstood. Generally across the board, we could probably say that in general and applied to HR specifically, it's not an area where I find folks have very much experience or clarity around what it even means and what it would look like. And that's where we get into the whole thing where we're not prepared to put someone or pay it and pay someone at level four or level five who's actually got the capability to think in a systems way and an integrated process way that we're able to actually add value to doing a stewardship kind of role. So that's one thing. The other thing that I get fascinated by is lining this model up against I'm just going to come over here. The whole other phenomenon that kicks in here is when you put corporate HR besides business unit HR, and I witness folks taking sort of models like this. I was in a conversation like this the other day and I thought to myself, my God, if I was one of these people, I would be so pissed off listening to this conversation because we take these kinds of models and say, well, only corporate people are doing stewardship, right? Only the higher up above fancy dance corporate HR people are doing stewardship and systems and processes and really business unit people are doing services. Well, that's a very naive way to be looking at the model too, because the reality is within the business unit HR, whoever is at a VP level heading up a business unit HR, they've got their own version of how that model plays out and then this model plays out here. The difference might be in the ratios and the time spent. So you might see something where in a corporate HR the stewardship might add up to 60% to 70% of the role and then at the business unit level it might be 20% as an example. But it isn't different stuff and one's not higher or of greater value than the other. I think that comes to your point because it's really at the business unit level that I think you get right into those direct conversations with managers.
Speaker F The stewardship for the corporate HR is stewards of business unit.
Speaker A Absolutely. Business unit absolutely. Yeah, right, exactly.
Speaker F I guess that the stewardship at corporate is policy making.
Speaker A Absolutely.
Speaker F An HR doing the organization helps to keep the thing running but I guess that it's basically aligned accountability to enforce the fulfillment of the policies that are devised at corporate level.
Speaker A Absolutely. And I think that is nice for bringing that because I think that's another tension that somehow we need to figure out a better way of working out because you've got the umbrella. Most folks I talk to in HR are dealing with the challenge where they have a whole bunch of business units all over the place. They have a history where the business units have all done their own thing and proud of it. Right, and then somebody in court is given the accountability to start to do some enterprise wide standardized processes and procedures around things so that we come at it from a good principle and policy perspective, but we also cut it from an economy of scale perspective. But often we don't put these two pictures together in terms of if you're accountable for the umbrella, stewardship and principle around that has that directly linked into how that plays out at a business unit level.
Speaker E I think one of the other interesting things is that in many business units the accountability for HR does not rest with HR, it's the business unit leader.
Speaker A Yes.
Speaker E And if you look and say that probably the most valuable asset that managers have to manage is the human asset, then line managers, regardless of their function.
Speaker B Have got an HR accountability and that HR accountability is not always recognized.
Speaker E And so when you get to the.
Speaker B Business unit level you get this friction between the operation of the business and HR which is often implanted out of corporate and has grown up from services.
Speaker A Yeah, it's like we have this thing here and what we're really talking about is this kind of.
Speaker G Another observation. I think I can relate to this because I come much of the synchron where it's a larger prize organization, bank of Montreal, in your case, CIBC, in my case.
Speaker B So that model of.
Speaker G A well differentiated corporate group in a client servicing side or relationship management side is true. But there's a lot of, I suspect a lot of people in this room, and certainly in the HR profession, a lot of HR leaders that are operating.
Speaker B A dual role.
Speaker G You only get the differentiation in large enterprise.
Speaker A Interesting point.
Speaker G And there's a lot of organizations that the head of HR, whether it is defined four or three or whatever, they.
Speaker A Wear both these hats at the same time. Yeah, which is really interesting because there's different elements around them, and you have to really be clear about honoring both of those hats. Yeah, that's a good point.
Speaker B So the next little model we'd like to share with you is one that I'm sure a lot of HR people have seen. And it's David all right model. And I happen to think it's a very good model. And I think that to a large extent, over the past number of years, as people look the Ulrich model, I've really said, okay, there's various types of work here, or roles or work within the HR function. And the top little box, and it is little, I made it a little bit by purpose as a change from the Ulrich model, the strategic partner. A lot of HR folks have said in the last while what we really need to be is strategic partners. And what they've looked at is said, we need to eliminate all this administrative work we're doing. One of the key questions I would have, and it's back to the is yes, but what does the line client want from you? And it's fine to say I would like to be a strategic partner. The reality is this is actually what is required, what is needed as much as employee champion, as much as a change agent. I would also suggest that perhaps this is a little bit hierarchical in nature that certainly and I know a company I was in recently, they made a comment, we are going to eliminate only benefits consulting, and we will have those HR people become more strategic. Now, what the levels of work tell you?
Speaker A Yeah.
Speaker E Last week in my mailbox, I got moments from society, human Resources Management in the States and from CIPD in England with the latest update that dave, we just released the last in the continuing series of worldwide surveys. And one of the biggest things that they found was that to be successful, to move beyond the traditional range in HR is that you have to be what he calls now a credible activist.
Speaker B And he says the trouble with a.
Speaker E Lot of HR people is they're either credible or activists. And sometimes you often get one without the other. And so to be credible, you have to be able to deliver on the operational side an effective and efficient operation to prove you can manage to get the respect of people else who are in the organization. And most HR people can't do that because they don't understand anything about business, because all of our education is entirely wrapped around compensation, recruitment, employee relations, and almost wrapped around running a business society. And Human Resources Management in the States has a big initiative now called the HR Business Academy, where they're trying to teach people HR people business. And I think that's a fundamental thing that's blocked people from going from level three three, or to level four. You can get to level three on technical competence, but you can't get beyond exactly.
Speaker A Absolutely.
Speaker B Exactly.
Speaker A Yeah. I just want to say a couple of additional things to that. Interestingly enough, too, if I take bank of Montreal as an example, and that's why it's so hard to talk about HR, I hate talking about things. I should have said that at the beginning. I hate doing these things because you're making these wildlizations where HR varies hugely. Right. So, as an example, to your point, rich HR in the wealth management part of the bank looks very much like these two things because that's what the client wants and that's how the client thinks. And that's the way it is in that kind of an environment. Then the bank of Montreal takes on this initiative they had around building a high performance culture. So it's across the board, company wide kind of thing. Has a lot of change intervention requirement about it, where you're actually working with impact management teams and doing process interventions with them about their business, starting with their business and working from there. What happened, though, was we didn't have in HR people qualified to do that kind of work. Like, you're talking about a huge expanse of skill requirements from those that are oriented to and great at this kind of stuff. And from my observation, HR usually has absolutely superb high level three people in it. Absolutely superbly, proficient, high level three people, tons of them, examples of what that's all about. But you start doing this other kind of work, and you're asking for not only the different cognitive capacity, but a whole kit and skill set that people just do not have inside, sitting inside organizations. So it's fascinating, again, how we embark on these initiatives with absolutely no appropriate resource to support the initiative.
Speaker C Your observation about what we think of as the three approach to work is a very certain, confident, improvement oriented, but.
Speaker B Not rethinking oriented way of doing work. So it creates a community of people who have a very highly energized, enthusiastic drive to keep things as they are, but just do it better.
Speaker A Yeah. And that's what their client wants. Right. When you listen to what the client's asking them to do. Often they're relying on them to be those kind of people right. Because they'll get it done and they'll get after so and so, and they'll follow up on this and it's beautiful within that category.
Speaker B So our first observation then was that the work of HR is either not clear to HR itself and or clear alignment between between HR and the client in terms of what is HR work. And I'm getting a sense that there's congruence of thinking around that as well.