How to develop an effective HR Business Partner

Many of us tend to agree that it is exciting to work in a fast-pace industry. You have a larger chance to obtain feedback from your clients much faster in a fast-pace industry. Agility is one of the positive attributes to your behaviour on a professional level and you can build agility through putting yourself in a fast-pace working environment.

However, everything has two sides. The flip side of this is that you sacrifice depth in your thought and action and will eventually find youself as a very speedy batelor. But did anybody tell you that HR is a field of reflex like badmington or kendo?

What can be done to help your HR Business Partners to escape from this easy trap? This is through assigning a task and a project. When you consolidate a people strategy as Head of Human Resources, you can ask your Business Partners to draft a people strategy. This is not an easy task. If your Business Partner finds the challenge too hard, you can organise a 1-hour meeting to go through the business strategy and jointly translate the business strategy into people strategy. If the industry moves fast, you may wish to run this exercise twice a year. You may wish to ask them to review their people strategy 3 months after to see if there is any significant gap between the strategy that was built and the situation surrounding the business. If your Business Partner spends 3 years with you, they will be able to perform people strategy review twelve times.

HR Business Partner = HR Sales

I recently started look at HR Business Partners as HR Sales. This is not a new concept because many HR professionals call their internal customers « my client ». However, do we see our clients through this lens to the end? If they are our clients, it makes sense to understand their needs, their business and their profile. There is nothing new about this. However, do we prepare a note about a specific client? Taking a summary note for the past conversation will surely help not only to seize their needs but also to forecast their future needs and moves. This will also help to strengthen relationship with the client and to select a best possible strategy when offering solution or advice. In other words, this activity will make an HR Business Partner more effective.

Seeing HR Business Partners as HR Sales will give you a different perspective and a new way to frame the activities. A salesperson typically sells a product. But they also sell an excellent user experience and a service through the product. This applies to HR Business Partners as well. An HR Business Partner sells HR products such as performance review, succession planning and executive management development programmes. By doing so, an HR Business Partner sells HR consultancy and HR service. To be an effective HR Business Partner, it is important to acquire robust knowledge about HR products. But it is equally important to learn how to sell the product and service based on the understanding of their client’s needs. Many people have claimed that HR Business Partners are internal consultants. I believe they are also internal salespersons. They will need to create folders per client in their PC to record the needs of their respective clients and the past record of services so that they can improve their skills and service. Is an HR Business Partner seeing their clients regularly and often enough? Do they understand the HR products well? What selling strategy have they got? What selling strategy works better for some clients, and not for others? Is there any pattern in the needs of the clients?