The HR Business Case Worked. The HR Model Didn't.

Earlier in my career, I took responsibility for implementing a completely new HR, Payroll and Health & Safety service.

The organisation had already developed and approved the business case and operating model.

Once I got into the detail, I realised something fairly fundamental was missing: the HR Business Partner roles.

When I raised it, I discovered they knew.

The roles had been deliberately left out because including them made the business case too expensive.

So we had approved a model knowing it didn't contain all the capability required to make it work.

Having taken the role, I had to make it work.

Over the next three years, continuous improvement, process redesign and productivity gains across HR, Payroll and H&S gradually released enough budget to introduce the missing capability.

And when we finally did, the model worked at its most successful.

That experience has stayed with me.

Making a business case cheaper by removing essential capability doesn't make the operating model cheaper. It simply moves the cost – and usually the problem – somewhere else.

What do you actually want HR to do?

I think that's a question organisations should answer before redesigning their People services.

Do you want excellent administration, payroll and employment support?

Or do you want strategic People capability alongside the business understanding the commercials, challenging thinking and helping shape organisational decisions?

Most organisations need elements of both.

But a company should consciously choose what it wants and then pay for the capability appropriate to that choice.

And that requires understanding the work first.

How much activity genuinely requires professional judgement? How much is administration?

What should managers own? What can employees self-serve? What can be automated? What should be outsourced? And what could be removed altogether?

Payroll is a particularly good example. It is business-critical, but that doesn't mean every activity surrounding payroll needs to be manual, local or owned by HR. Good process, clean data, clear ownership and appropriate technology can remove huge amounts of unnecessary work around the payroll itself.

Because many organisations are unknowingly paying strategic-level salaries for administrative work.

This is particularly easy in smaller or geographically dispersed organisations, where HR roles naturally become generalist and the boundaries between HR, payroll and administration can become blurred.

So before drawing the organisation chart, assess the work and understand its cost.

Then decide:

• Strategic or operational?
• Global or local?
• Internal or outsourced?
• Human or automated?

Only then can you design the People capability and services the business actually needs.

Because a successful business case and a successful operating model are not necessarily the same thing.

I learnt that one the hard way.

This is Part 1 of a two-part series. Part 2 – Do You Need a CPO, or Do You Need CPO Experience? – follows on Tuesday 22 September.