I was away for the latest Tap’d Talks HR podcast, and Andi Roberts stepped in to host. His guest was Fiona Ryland, who has been the government’s Chief People Officer and, before that, Chief Operating Officer at UCL. Fiona has just published a paper called “The New HRBP” (https://tapdsolutions.com/report-the-new-hrbp-unlocking-strategic-impact/), and her argument is one that I suspect many HR leaders will recognise. Organisations have spent a great deal of money on HR operating models designed to free business partners for strategic work, and for the most part it hasn’t happened.
The model is fine, so what is going wrong?
Most organisations Fiona has come across have put in some version of the Ulrich model. There are shared services, centres of expertise for areas like learning and development, and business partners embedded in the business. In theory that should leave the business partner with room to think. Yet what Fiona hears from chief people officers and from business partners themselves is that they are busier than ever with operational work. She sees three causes, and they are tied together.
The first is that business partners are the most visible face of HR. When something goes wrong elsewhere in the system, they are the ones who step in and fix it. Often the operating model hasn’t been explained well, or it has been explained and nobody likes it. Local managers feel shared services are slow and remote, and that the systems don’t work well. Centres of expertise work to organisational priorities that may not match what a local manager wants, so a request for communication skills training meets a different programme that someone else has already planned. Ideally that gets debated and agreed with the business partner. Often it doesn’t, and the business partner is left to either deliver it themselves or tell the manager that there is no support.
The second is that the line between what managers do and what business partners do has become blurred. Fiona has a lot of sympathy with managers here. The job has become harder, organisations are investing less in management capability, and what gets valued is usually the technical side of the role. People are promoted into management who may not want to be there, or who haven’t been trained. They are short of time, they don’t want to get a people issue wrong, and so the work defaults to the business partner.
The third is that business partners themselves haven’t been developed enough. Fiona listed commercial knowledge, data and people insight, and influencing skills. Areas like strategic workforce planning, talent management and organisational design also need investment. When that confidence isn’t there, helping with a disciplinary case or a piece of recruitment is the easier thing to do.
A typical Tuesday
Fiona gave a good picture of what this looks like from the inside. A manager calls because they don’t understand the answer shared services gave them about someone on maternity leave. Another has been through the employee relations team on a disciplinary matter but wants someone to double check. A new performance management policy has arrived and nobody has had time to read it. With fifteen or twenty managers in a business unit, those calls add up.
The business partner has choices. They can push the query back to shared services, work with the centre of expertise to improve how something is communicated, or step in. Most step in, because they know how busy managers are, and that helps in the short term. But it uses up the time and headspace they would need to think about retaining talent, or what AI means for their part of the business. And, as Fiona admitted, that kind of thinking is harder than fixing today’s problem. She was keen to say that the operational work is highly valuable. The issue is that it crowds out everything else.
Andi compared it to IT support, where the business partner has become level two, picking up whatever level one couldn’t solve. I thought that was a fair description.
Where to start
Fiona sets out four enablers. Decide what the line manager role is in your organisation and upskill managers against it. Be clear about who does what between line managers and HR. Make sure the operating model works, including what sits in shared services, centres of expertise and with business partners. And build the capability of the business partners themselves.
She is realistic that you need to look at all four, but her no-regrets first move is the business partners. Operating model changes and large manager programmes take time and money. There are fewer business partners, and building their coaching skills and confidence with data makes a difference quickly. They are then in a better position to help with the other three.
The point I took away is Fiona’s view that it pays to slow down to go faster. Before building anything, ask what these roles are here to do, what problem you are trying to fix and what the evidence is for it. It takes longer, but you are more likely to be fixing the real problem.
The full conversation is on the Tap’d Talks HR podcast, and you can download Fiona’s paper https://tapdsolutions.com/report-the-new-hrbp-unlocking-strategic-impact/.
