In his strategic keynote, Dr Steven Hunt, senior director, business execution practices, SuccessFactors, shared four steps to getting the greatest strategic value from technology-enabled HR processes.

At its most basic, strategic HR is about getting the right people doing the right things the right way.

“HR does not directly impact business results. What HR processes do is change root forces; they change people’s behaviour. Changing people’s behaviour enables you to create business results,” said Hunt.

The other side of the HR coin – administrative HR – is about supporting personnel management and fulfilling the employment contract, with a focus on values efficiency and risk avoidance.

“Administrative HR is about employing people, strategic HR is part of the business case,” said Hunt.

In preface to sharing his knowledge about how to make HR processes more strategic, Hunt reminded attendees that administrative HR is still critical to the business.

“All the strategic HR in the world doesn’t mean anything if people’s paycheques don’t show up on time,” he said.

Hunt said that strategic HR is about competitive advantage. Business leaders care about this a lot, but why don’t they care about strategic HR processes?

Hunt shared four basic steps to get organisations to recognise the strategic value that HR brings to the table by using processes to create business change, “because we do bring a lot of value”, he states.

Step 1: Establish HR credibility

If you want to build credibility as an HR person, explains Hunt, the first step is to get better data, and the second is to focus on the fundamentals and get away from the fads.

These are two areas where many HR professionals “shoot themselves in the foot”, according to Hunt.
“We need better, more solid HR data. What we also need is to be more serious about our profession,” he said.

Step 2: Define what you want to change

Once you have gotten people to actually trust your advice, it is extremely important to be really clear about what you are trying to change in the organisation and why.

“People don’t like to change but they will if it makes sense,” said Hunt. “It takes effort to change, so you want to make sure that you are changing the right things.”

Hunt shared some key steps for defining what you need to change:

Understand strategy: What does the company need to achieve? How does it intend to achieve it? “Going through and engaging business leaders in that conversation is really important for defining why we are trying to change the workforce,” Hunt said.

Link the strategy to these business execution drivers:
1. Alignment: Are people focusing on the things that matter for delivering our strategy?
2. Productivity: Are people doing what we asked them to do?
3. Efficiency: Are we optimising our investment in people?
4. Sustainability: Are we at risk of losing performers? Can we maintain current performance levels?
5. Scalability: Do we have processes to ensure a steady supply of the talent needed to execute our strategies?

6. Governance (risk and compliance): Is anyone doing things that are creating significant liabilities for our business?

Leverage talent processes: How will we create these changes in the workforce? What do we need to change about how we find, manage, evaluate and develop people?

Step 3: Provide tools and knowledge

Tools and knowledge need to be provided to enable people to make that change, which is where SuccessFactors comes in.

“We are in a really, really exciting time in the field of HR in terms of the technology we have available to us,” said Hunt. “This technology is allowing us to take the knowledge and expertise that’s in our heads and getting it into the hands of people in the fields so they can use it.”

Step 4: Driving adoption

Adoption must be driven through business leaders so that the change is embraced. Leaders should endorse, enforce and exhibit the change so that employees see the benefits for themselves.

“It’s about getting the leaders of your company to become role models for change who want their employees to follow,” Hunt said.

The risks involved in driving adoption include:

• Failing to fully define and understand the change;
• Too many features too fast;
• Automating poor processes – “doing bad things quickly”;
• Asking people to do things they don’t know how to do; and
• Failing to create opportunities that demonstrate leadership support for change.

This article was originally published in Inside SAP Winter 2013.