Efficiency gains

Article Type: Editorial From: Strategic HR Review, Volume 9, Issue 1

This issue of Strategic HR Review is about efficiency gains,including the metrics to demonstrate them, the skills HR needs to achieve them and the technology that can be applied to assist.

In their paper, “Getting the measure of HR”, Dr John Mahoney-Phillips and Anna Adams outline how UBS went about creating a set of metrics for measuring HR contribution – driven by the belief of the group head of HR that senior management should be able to see the impact of HR processes and that clearly defined HR metrics would benefit the value of the organization and HR. The company’s human capital team went about creating a process for defining HR metrics, starting with the HR value chain and working through a questioning process to define the most relevant metrics. The authors demonstrate how this process was applied to one particular area (talent acquisition) and discuss the early benefits that have been gained from this focus on measurement.

“An evidence-based approach to developing HR strategy: transformation in Royal Mail”, by Dr Alan Bourne and Dale Haddon, looks at the link between HR and business strategy and the role that HR plays in identifying the people aspects of implementation as well as understanding stakeholders’operational and commercial views of a business strategy and how it translates in practical terms. The authors argue that for HR to show the value of this role,it must develop a strategy that is grounded in the key business metrics particular to its organization. This ensures the HR strategy is linked to the organization’s performance drivers and positions HR as a credible business partner able to rationalize and support its actions. They look at the case of Royal Mail Letters, which benefited from an evidence-based, metrics-driven approach to formulating HR strategy. There are, however, some practical implications for the HR profession of taking such an approach, mainly relating to skills and competencies in carrying out analytics and dealing with business strategy and partners in a credible way.

In “Recession: a shot in the arm for HR”, Ed Griffin and Grahame Smith argue that times of financial difficulty are an opportunity for the HR function to show its real worth. They urge caution against being labeled the“executioner’s assistant,” and being seen solely as an assist in redundancies and downsizing, and encourage HR professionals to look at and demonstrate how they can help steer the organization through difficult times and make those important efficiency gains. First, HR needs to be in good shape itself and the authors put forward a model depicting the functional areas on which HR should focus in order to contribute to the long-term success of the organization. In addition to proficiency in the functional aspects of the role,HR professionals also need to have personal impact and leadership to help managers in the business make difficult decisions and be confident with radical change where required.

In “Improving competence and compliance through self-service and e-learning development”, Matt Mundey looks at the important role that technology has played in a public sector healthcare organization. Faced with the challenges of restructuring for cost reduction, legislative requirements to improve standards and higher costs relating to medical negligence, this organization turned to technology as a means of creating an affordable and effective learning and development program to create the competent staff required. Well-trained staff would work more efficiently, deliver better care and be less of a risk, and therefore were key to addressing the challenges it faced. The solution came in the form of a web-based learning management system with self-service functionality, allowing a team of 20 people to look after the learning needs of over 3,500 staff distributed across more than 100 different locations and to offer the high levels of reporting required to meet quality and training standards.

Efficiency gains through the application of technology is the focus of Rachel Aitken’s paper, “Building for the future with virtual learning”. She addresses the conundrum of how to up-skill and train a workforce to improve individual productivity and overall business performance, while at the same time reducing operational costs. She points to e-learning as the solution and, in particular, to conferencing and claims that training managers could expect to get around five times the number of training sessions for their money using conferencing technology to deliver virtual learning compared to traditional face-to-face training. From a value perspective, both methods can deliver improved productivity and business performance, but conferencing has the added value of allowing for cost reduction – both operational and environmental. The author looks at two educational organizations that have benefited from the application of conferencing technology.

Sara NolanE-mail: maialto:shr@emeraldinsight.com