Striving Towards HR Excellence Using HR Maturity Framework

The debate and questions revolving around the HR Business Partnership concept and how can HR start delivering more value to the business is still on-going with no sign it will end any time soon. To try to help HR answer these questions and support them in increasing the value they deliver to the business, my associates and I have devised the HR Maturity Framework.

The HR Maturity Framework is a combination of the tool and the process designed to assist HR departments in evaluating their current situation across diverse HR capabilities. It aims to facilitate alignment between HR and business requirements by delineating desired maturity levels for each capability within a specified timeframe, thus enabling more effective support for achieving business goals. By providing a comprehensive overview of both present and future capabilities, the framework enables HR to identify the gaps, heatmap these gaps according to their importance for achieving the business goals, initiate constructive dialogues regarding remedial actions and their implications from the benefit-to-cost perspective for the business, make a proper prioritization, and follow up with the action plan.

HR Maturity Framework consists of 17 HR capabilities grouped into four areas: (1) Strategic HR, (2) HR Operations, (3) HR Enablers, and (4) HR Outcomes.

From the Strategic HR perspective, HR needs to understand how the business works and how the value for customers is being added throughout the entire value chain. Moreover, HR needs to engage in planning their activities in a way that will always be a function of achieving business goals. However, they are expected to bring value in actively shaping organizational culture that will support fulfilling the mission of their organization. HR also needs to be proactively and continuously involved in organization design and workforce planning to keep adjusting the organization to ever changing business needs while being master at using proper change management practices. Once this is the case, HR will be seen as holding an influential position, with an equal voice alongside business leaders, impacting both the formulation and implementation of strategy.

HR Operations are day-to-day activities that must be executed seamlessly for an organization to keep running and achieving its business goals. In a way, these might be called core HR activities as they provide the essence of what HR is all about. These are the activities around which the business has already built certain expectations, and where certain level of service quality is a must. Here, we refer to talent sourcing and acquisition, talent and leadership development, performance management, succession planning, and total rewards management.

To make both strategic and operational HR activities as effective as possible, there is a need to have proper HR Enablers in place. Here, we refer to policies and procedures aiming to standardize HR activities to a certain extent, technologies and systems that support and partly automate their execution, reporting and workforce analytics bringing transparency, and operations improvement to make sure HR processes are being improved continuously. These are the capabilities that aim to support the execution of HR activities that bring value to the business. As such, enablers are usually being done in the background and not visible to the business. However, if they stopped being done at any point, they would seriously undermine the execution of strategic and operational HR activities almost instantly and this would become obvious to anyone in the organization.

Finally, HR outcomes are the result of the execution in the three aforementioned capability areas. Here, we think of HR credibility, employer brand, and talent engagement. These three dimensions might be seen as lagging indicators because there is a significant time lag between conducting strategic, operational, and enabling HR activities in a certain way, and then seeing the results in terms of how credible the HR is viewed from the business perspective, how is the employer brand being perceived internally and externally, and how engaged the workforce is.

The need to grow HR maturity is beneficial for both the business and HR. For the business, it adds tremendous value if executives and senior managers can focus on the business planning and delivery while knowing they have proper business partners always on top of things when it comes to continually supporting the business efforts from the people and organization perspective. As for HR, this means overcoming the current doubts coming from the business side by making significant progress in understanding the business and contributing more from both strategic and operational perspective. In this way, HR will be able to command more respect from the business and position itself as an equal business partner with the seat at the executive table well earned.