A business savvy people function?

How often have we as a function talked about needing to be business savvy? 

It’s certainly a conversation we’ve heard frequently as we’ve moved to the Ulrich model i.e., Business Partner, Centres of Excellence and Shared Services. The Chartered Institute of Personnel & Development (CIPD) view is that as people professionals we should understand our organisations purpose, future direction, priorities and performance, as well as understanding external influences and trends.  To reflect this the CIPD’s professional map has an entire area on business acumen. This covers topics such as financial literacy, business planning and supplier management.

At InFocus HR we would fully agree. As a profession, understanding what the organisation is trying to achieve and performance against goals and budgets is critical, as it supports our engagement with stakeholders.   As a profession though the question we need to ask is whether we run our function in the way that we expect our organisational managers to operate theirs?  A Gartner article from May 2020 referenced an emerging trend for HR Chief Operating Officer roles. They specifically call out a need to focus on the operation of the function itself i.e. being business savvy!

So, how do we apply that business focus to the people function?

Business acumen can cover a wide range of areas. We should be clear this is not necessarily about creating yet another team within the function. Depending on organisational size this can be built into someone’s role. Or it could be a dedicated Business Management position. For bigger organisations it could be delivered via a small team.   Typical areas of scope would include:

Over the next 5 weeks we will publish a series of blogs on each of these specialist areas. Going into more detail around what could or should be undertaken to support the functional objectives.

This week, we will start with Finance

Research commissioned in 2015 through Bersin by Deloitte^[1] highlighted that 90% of HR leads felt they had a handle on their budgets.  However, our experience would suggest that awareness of finance and more basic budgeting can vary significantly. Both at an organisational and certainly a people leadership team level. Generally the top line people budget is understood. However, how that spend breaks down, when it’s due to occur and how the budgets are tracking can often be missing or not understood. 

So, what should good finance management look like within the function?

Well, the first thing to say is that this shouldn’t be about creating a shadow finance role within the function. The CFO is unlikely to respond well to that!   In reality the activities undertaken are unlikely to require a full-time role, although there will be peaks and troughs in workload, driven by the budgeting year.  The support must be complimentary to how your organisation’s finance function operates. We would generally expect it cover the following:

• Engaging with people leads to determine budget requirements. For example this could be financial as well as other resources.
• Building the case for securing additional funding to deliver the people strategy. Or just to reflect increased operational costs.  Focusing on the justifications in advance can often ease the sign off process through an organisations budgetary cycle.
• Working with finance and the people leads to phase budgets and track spend throughout the year. Identify potential over/underspends (including why?). Agreeing options for managing i.e., pulling forward or delaying spend on new things, thereby managing expectations.
• Supporting the function with pulling together business cases. In addition to assessing the impact on BAU budgets and understanding how Finance might assess a business case can help with successful sign off.
• Providing quality assurance to the people lead in terms of budgeting should free up their valuable time.
• Raising the Finance teams awareness and understanding of the functional plan.
• Coaching the people leadership team around money and ensuring that budgets are a regular discussion and review point throughout the year

To sum up

Further insight into Business Management

Over the next 5 weeks we will continue to explore the concept of business management within the people function covering:

• People strategy
• People & functional analytics.
• Risk Management.
• Supplier Management.
• Project Management (including continuous improvement).

Do you want to find out how InFocus HR can help you with implementing or reviewing your current business management approach? If yes then click here for more information and to request an initial obligation free conversation.

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^[1] Bersin by Deloitte, High-Impact HR

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