How HR Business Partners Create Extraordinary Value for Business and People

HR Business Partners (HRBPs) play an indispensable and strategic role for organizations, teams, leaders and people by providing knowledge, strategic support, leadership, insights, data and information that create the conditions for success.

Strategic HRBPs have a unique blend of HR expertise and business acumen that is fundamental to empower teams and leaders to excel and achieve their objectives. HRBPs provide people solutions to business problems. In that unique intersection of people, culture, strategy and performance is where they deliver extraordinary value that only HR can offer.

By the way, when we say HRBPs we often refer to HR professionals who have breadth and width of knowledge about business and people operations. Sometimes they are managers or directors who fulfill the role of an HRBP, perhaps with a wider scope or more decision-making authority.

Nonetheless, at the heart of the work that HRBPs or those fulfilling the business partnering role do, we find: their ability to align talent acquisition with team goals; they are catalysts for goal-setting excellence, fostering a shared vision within small teams; they support an environment of continuous improvement; among other responsibilities.

Here is a list of fourteen ways in which HRBPs add exceptional strategic value to organizations, teams, leaders and people.

How HRBPs Create Exceptional Value

These some of the unique ways in which HRBPs create exceptional value.

1. Talent Acquisition Alignment: By collaborating closely with team leaders, HR BPs can create detailed job profiles, use targeted recruitment channels, and conduct tailored interviews to find candidates who fit the team's requirements. This alignment ensures that the right talent is brought in, maximizing the team's ability to achieve its limited yet critical goals.
2. Goal Setting: HR BPs support the team and leaders by helping align individual and team goals with business objectives, ensuring a shared vision within the small team. Collaborative goal-setting fosters a sense of ownership and commitment among team members, driving overall team performance.
3. Performance Management: HR BPs can work with team leaders to establish clear performance objectives, implement regular performance reviews, and provide coaching and feedback to leaders and people to maintain ongoing communication around all things feedback and achievements. This effective performance management approach cultivates a sense of people’s accountability to achieve their goals, and also the leader’s responsibility to provide support.
4. Managing Employee Performance Issues: HR BPs work together with team leaders to conduct performance improvement discussions, offering support to struggling employees, and implementing performance improvement plans. Addressing performance issues should never be solely a matter left to HR. Business and team leaders must take an active role. HR BPs facilitate the conversations and provide resources and support for leaders and team members to better align and manage performance issues.
5. Feedback: HR BPs support the creation of feedback channels (via focus groups, one-on-one conversations or technology) to encourage regular feedback exchanges between team members and leaders. Effective feedback is an avenue to provide valuable insights that help identify areas for improvement (in the leader and team members).
6. Training and Development: By thoroughly understanding the team’s goals, indicators and metrics of success, HR BPs can conduct skill gap assessments, curate or develop training programs, and provide opportunities for continuous learning that help upskill and reskill people with the ultimate objective of helping the team achieve its goals. This targeted training approach directly benefits the team's ability to deliver on its objectives.
7. Succession Planning: In tandem with team leaders, HR BPs can design the right tools and assessments to identify individuals in the team who can take on leadership roles, design individual development plans, and facilitate knowledge transfer to support potential leaders’ successors. Succession planning at the team level ensures continuity and minimizes disruptions during leadership changes.
8. Workforce Planning: HR BPs can use data and forecasting to anticipate workforce needs, develop recruitment strategies, and identify opportunities for upskilling or reskilling. Effective workforce planning ensures that the team has the right mix of skills and talents to handle their specific needs effectively. For this, HR BPs must have a total understanding about the goals of the team and then the ability to translate those goals into workforce needs (people, talent and skills).
9. Change Management: HR BPs can be a fundamental asset in supporting the team to create change management plans, provide resources for training and support during transitions, and measure the impact of change. Skillful change management enables the team to adapt quickly to new strategies or processes with minimal disruption.
10. Data-Informed Insights: HR BPs can collect and analyze HR data, creating powerful stories and visualizations to highlight trends and present data-backed recommendations to team leaders. Access to data-informed insights helps teams make informed decisions, optimizing their limited resources. In this case, one of the most important activities for HR BPs is to have a thorough understanding of the business and team’s strategy, the challenges and problems they are facing, and proposing talent solutions backed by data.
11. Employee Engagement: HR BPs can support employee engagement and experience, and culture at the team level by conducting various kinds of surveys, architecting and shaping a better culture or improvements in the existing culture, recognizing achievements, among others. High levels of employee engagement and experience foster a motivated workforce, driving the team's success.
12. Conflict Resolution: HR BPs mediate conflicts impartially, creating a safe space for communication and coaching team leaders on effective conflict management techniques. Responding and addressing conflicts preserve a positive team culture and maintains focus on objectives.
13. Empower Direct Managers: HR BPs provide leadership development programs, coaching and support to direct managers in order to improve their people leadership skills and equip them with necessary knowledge and tools to do their leadership work effectively. Direct managers are the conductors that ensure harmony in a team and turn it into a high-performing community. Direct managers are the guardians of team’s culture and, thus, need support to do so effectively.
14. Diversity and Inclusion: HR BPs champion diversity and inclusion initiatives, foster an inclusive culture, and implement diversity training to promote understanding and respect at the team level. In doing so, HR BPs help leaders unlock unique perspectives and creative problem-solving, driving innovation and success. Often, team leaders are not knowledgeable or savvy about how to create an inclusive team culture that makes people feel that they belong. HR BPs support them with coaching and leadership.

ENROLL TODAY

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More: https://hackinghrlab.io/hr-certificate-programs/strategic-hr-businesspartner-cohort-one/

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