Are you the Dodo? the Future of the Business Partnering role

Belia Nel - international Certified Performance Technologist

The Business Partner of the future should be future-ready to optimise business in a current challenging environment. In the next decade more than a third of jobs won’t need a human to execute.  As Alan Hosking writes “Unless you’ve just returned from a long stint on Mars, you will be very familiar with all the talk, articles, presentations and workshops that are shouting out the same message: big changes are coming they’re unprecedented in terms of their scope, impact an magnitude”.

70%-80% of jobs will disappear in the next five to 10 years or possibly even sooner. And it seems the jobs that are the most vulnerable are those of a repetitive or technical nature. The scarce skills of the future will be human skills; in other words skills that cannot be easily replicated by robotic or AI (artificial intelligence).

Human intervention will continue as a critical skill to do “problem sensing”. This skill will assist managers and business partners to sense a potential problem or sense the situational complexity of a problem. In the future humans will almost never be used to solve problems because robots will; however our ability to sense a problem, will remain important.

So the question is: is your role as a Business Partner about to become extinct? And what are the implications? Are you providing more technical or transactional HR services to your organisation? Or are you adding business value by improving performance or “problem sensing” potential performance issues?

In the past there was a focus on “transformational HR” (i.e. helping business cascading strategy and operationalising it at all levels). However, in the Future of Work (FOW) this is old thinking. There is, and will continue to be, a new focus on purpose and how you can get all levels and groups of employees to buy into this by being engaged.

This is far more important than trying to engage employees with radical, faddish engagement models. Future-thinking organisations are asking:

What is our purpose?

Who are the customers we want to attract?

What type of talent do we want to attract and how do we develop them?

There are a number of challenges business partners face today. Dave Ulrich’s business partner model was launched to great acclaim in 1997 in the book, Human Resource Champions. In 2008, he highlighted some of lessons learnt since the publication of the definitive publication and answered the important question: where did we go wrong? According to Ulrich we have a misguided purpose.  The original aim of the HR Resource Champion model lost its meaning of integrating purposefully into the business. We are not creating enough value: the role of a partner to the business will remain critical because of the value creation by assisting management to focus on improving the performance of the organisation.

According to CEB Global, upgrading business partnering talent and removing barriers to performance, organisations can boost their effectiveness in the following categories by increasing:

Employee performance: 22%

Employee retention: 24%

Revenue growth: 7%

Profit growth: 9%

Ensuring you have the right skills-set is critical for future-proofing your role as a business focused and competent partner.  Developing the competencies as indicated in the diagram will lead to success and value creation for the organisation. 

Ulrich further points out that intellectual and process leadership should never be underestimated. And some people will never be business partners – this is what it is. He cautions not to blame technology but learn how to use it for data analytics and data management. The final point is to shift from policies and transactional activities to value creation by improving performance but this may be too great a shift for some.

There are 10 ways you innovate your role for the Future of Work. Today, 20 years later you can innovate your role without actually changing what you do:

·      Ensure your competence is balanced with your knowledge of the business as well as the human side.

·      Know and learn the business well enough to call yourself a business partner. Regain credibility by understanding the purpose of the organisation. Only focusing on strategy implementation is not good enough.

·      Don’t only focus on transactional or administrative work. Soon this will be digitised for electronic processing anyway. And don’t only focus on technical ability. The major focus of your role should be agility – your ability to sense the future and respond swiftly to your business’s’ needs.

·      Do focus on the human side of the business as it will emerge as a key source of competitive advantage for you.

·      Contribute to the strategic business decisions of the organisation otherwise you are not adding value and can be replaced.

·      Become a specialist in the processes of human and organisational optimisation and you will become central to business success.

·      Don’t measure processes – measure results and sustain your organisation’s business performance by measuring the right things – not processes but impact.

·      Learn how to add value – truly. Identify your organisation’s pressure points. Learn how to ask the right questions. A good questioning technique will go a long way to contributing to your success.

·      Develop yourself continuously and change your business partnering role blueprint – this will set you apart from others. Read widely about the Future of Work and stay informed about developments in this space.

·      Don’t label just any role in Human Capital as Business Partner because in this case it is not.

In conclusion, develop your own blueprint for the business partnering role of the future. Remember this acronym, it will help to keep you at the top of your game:

F – Focus on the future purpose.

U – Understand the business.

T – Commit to being data savvy.

U – Undo your old ways.

R – Be relevant.

E – Evolve your thinking and knowledge.

Aim to achieve a changing view of the business partnering role as results-driven and value-add partner in your organisation in the Future of Work age.

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