In the 21st century, being HR professional means understanding and translating the following foundation into practice.
- People Plan vs HR Plan
- Principles-led
- Evidence-based
- Outcome-driven
People Plan vs HR Plan
If you have read a few books by David Ulrich, you should be familiar with these words. A People Plan is a plan to develop organisation capabilities. An HR Plan is a plan for Human Resources department.
For instance, completing a payroll migration in time is a good example of Human Resources department. This will never be part of People Plan because payroll vendor does not contribute to people capabilities of an organsation.
Building agility, however, is a good example of People Plan.
Principles-led
Principles are in opposition to rules. If HR professionals are led by rules, they may end up creating rules of the sake of rules and will undermine agility of the organisation.
Rules can create boundaries and cause unintended results. Rules are not fast enough to cope with changes. If you look at the regulations developed by the government, you tend to see delay. This is because rules and laws are not agile / adaptive to fast changes.
Principles help you to act with speed and consitency.
If HR professionals are led by principles, their decisiong-making will become more consistent, and this will help HR professionals to influence the people managers in decision-making.
Evidence-based
Evidence is a powerful tool to give HR professionals an ability to influence decision-making.
HR professionals have a good understanding of theory around people management and behaviour psychology and this is reinforced by their experience with working with People Managers, and this forms an insight. However, not all People Managers take the advice as it is. Evidence such as people analytics or bench marking data supplements the insight of HR professionals.
Evidence helps HR professionals to develop a compelling story to tell.
Outcome-driven
Many people are happy to claim what they have achieved, and they try to prove this through showing the actions they have completed. Here is a list of actions that were agreed, and this list shows the completion status of all the actions. 100% completion, super!
But is it really super?
Let's take a diet as an example. You decide to lose weight by 5 kg. To do this, you bring restriction to your way of eating and you agreed to set three actions with a due date. You have completed all the actions. Can you claim that you have made accomplishment?
Yes you can only if you have successfully lost your weight. The outcome is 5 kg loss. The three actions were supposed to achieve this. If you cannot get the desired outcome, what is the pont of being happy with the completion of all the actions?
This applies to all professional work including HR work. Let's set a metric to measure the outcome or impact of the actions agreed.
Summary
HR profession is a journey and there is probably no end. So I will not make any conclusion here. However, what I can add here is that People Plan shows where (a direction) while the other three values show how.
