Sunprise 2.0
Time to give an update. Lot of things happened. Sun announced a major restructuring back in November 2008 and I am very positive that we will come out of this as a much stronger company.
Although times
are difficult we keep momentum with our Enterprise 2.0 strategy. It
is really worth going to Peter's
blog and have a look at what happened mainly with our internal
collaboration tool SunSpace. Formerly the main users were our
technical presales employees and it was known under the name CE 2.0.
100
days after launch in July 2008 we had a dramatic increase of
registered users to 20000 Sun employees. Actually now we are at more
than 25000 (which is more than 70% of all Sun employees). Sun Space is a socially-enabled community, part Facebook,
part wiki, part forum and part document-sharing destination. It
allows users to create their own social networks and profile pages,
then join communities on a range of topics. But it is a lot more than
these simple words can describe, a lot of interesting widgets and
features, Peter described them extensively.
This is exactly the tool we are now using with our global HR Business Partner community. We created a place to share best practices in a structured way. In my opinion one of the most important things in our world of knowledge workers today. We developed an initial best practices taxonomy out of which someone posting a new practice needs to choose where to fit their own. Then a template helps to put some standard and structure around each of the practices posted which makes the process very easy. Finally attachments and/or links can be added.
The benefits really are obvious: enabling reuse of knowledge shortens our „time to client“, learning is fostered as is building our global community of HR Business Partners. We even have it in our job descriptions: „Collaborates across the function to effectively leverage in-house expertise in aid of solving client issues“. On top of all that people will learn to use new technologies! We are actually in the middle of rolling this out officially and starting to drive participation. I am just about to join the community leaders community....We're really taking a big step ahead in direction of HR 2.0!
Read this entry from Peter for a summary on Sun's Enterprise 2.0 activities. It is worth having a brief look at the white paper „The Estuary Effect“ which describes what we are doing from blogs, wikis, forums to socially enabled communities.
I also want to reference my former blog entries on the value of social networking for the enterprise and for HR (including a brief presentation) and Enterprise 2.0/HR 2.0.
Posted at
07:18PM Mar 08, 2009
by Volker Seubert in Sun |
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Web 2.0! Enterprise 2.0! HR 2.0?
Peter Reiser is really working on interesting stuff which he lays out in his blog “Web 2.0 applied in an Enterprise – a huge business opportunity”. He is using the case of Sun's internal Customer Engineering Web to describe how effectively set up a community or formal network within an enterprise. Let me pick this up and give some thoughts on why I think Human Resources needs to embrace Web 2.0 more. I even believe HR's involvement is crucial on a company's path to Enterprise 2.0. The article “The 21st-century organization” gives a lot of evidence on this and I will use parts of it in this entry.
I actually see 4 different benefits to using Web 2.0 mechanisms in and beyond the enterprise:
Knowledge Management: Employees contribute and share content via a network platform or portal that has all Web 2.0 features like tagging (which creates a folksonomy), wikis, search engines and voting in order to systemize the content and make finding content as well as contributing it really easy minimizing search and coordination cost.
“Knowledge workers” (also referred to as “tacit employees”) in many industries (e.g. high tech industry) account for 25 percent or more of the workforce. They undertake key line activities and are the innovators of new business ideas. Therefor it is key for the productivity and even innovation capabilities of a company to create an environment that motivates them to give the best.
HR can play a major role initiating these communities and platforms and implement the recognition model around it to secure motivation of employees to contribute high value content. Employees who are main contributors and highly valued could be voted by the community to become a member in a special group of employees who will have access to a set of benefits like being part of management teams as advisor, or have the possibility to pursue specific career paths.
Skill Management: Through active participation in the community employees will make their reputation as experts for specific areas. In addition every employee could be asked to establish a personal page which describes his/her experience in the form of tags. Then employees with specific experience could be found easily via search.
On the other hand the company would have the possibility to know if there were only one or two experts in a high demand area and could start initiatives building those missing skills.
Learning departments in most companies belong to HR, so this area is a key HR topic. HR and the learning organization should be the driver of implementing innovative Web 2.0 models to do skills management in an enterprise.
Communication: The most obvious element of Web 2.0 benefits for communication are probably blogs. Internally they can be used for information sharing and as discussion boards for new ideas. The web based communities foster communication amongst their participants integrating remote working employees and teams. They facilitate communication across organization boundaries. In times of an increasing matrix environment it becomes more and more critical to provide an environment for employees to gain more easy and comfortable access to information in order to participate in business processes.
HR has a crucial interest in good internal communication to create an open company culture, overcome organizational barriers and keep employee morale and motivation high. The internal communication function is mostly tied to HR.
Partner Relationships: It may not be obvious why internal communities should be expanded to external partners like customers, suppliers or resellers. There are multiple benefits: tie them to the company, keep them informed and give access to crucial information but also receive the benefit of more members participating to the community and sharing contents.
All of the above benefits are based on a community of actively participating employees or simply the benefit of established formal networks. HR can initiate these networks, can help formalize the role of the network within the organization, can make sure that an owner of a network is found and established, can develop incentives for membership, can create frameworks with standards and protocols that makes the network flourish.
A formal network with specific areas of economic accountability can be used instead of a matrix structure as it often serves to attain the same goals with the difference (and benefit) of having to manage a community of self directed employees instead of a hierarchy. It makes working horizontally far more cost effective and takes tension out of the system. The performance management of self directed employees on the other hand is critical. To motivate behavior, measuring performance is more important than providing financial incentives to reward it. Metrics must be established and tailored to individual roles and people.
Overall, creating a state of the art environment will make employees feel more valued and does not only lead to higher productivity but also retains employees!
Posted at
09:41PM Mar 25, 2007
by Volker Seubert in Human Resources |
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HR Roles Update
To update my blog on the Ulrich HR Roles topic I have to mention his last publication on HR roles: The HR Value Proposition from June 2005. Chapter 9 is dedicated to “Roles for HR Professionals”. Basically it picks up the roles concept from the book “HR Champions” as referred to in my blog about our HR Organization and updates this concept. Some ideas are given by him and his partner in this articel: HR's New Mandate: Be a Strategic Player. From there I borrow the following table that shows the evolution of HR roles according to Ulrich:
| Mid-1990s | Mid-2000s | Evolution of Thinking |
| Employee champion | Employee advocate (EA), human capital (HC) developer | Employees are increasingly critical to the success of organizations. EA focuses on today's employee; HC developer focuses on how employees prepare for the future. |
| Administrative expert | Functional expert | HR practices are central to HR value. Some HR practices are delivered through administrative efficiency (such as technology), and others through policies, menus, and interventions, expanding the"functional expert" role. |
| Change agent | Strategic partner | Being a strategic partner has multiple dimensions: business expert, change agent, knowledge manager, and consultant. Being a change agent represents only part of the strategic partner role. |
| Strategic Partner | Strategic partner | As above. |
| Leader | The sum of the first four roles equals leadership, but being an HR leader also has implications for leading the HR function, collaborating with other functions, ensuring corporate governance, and monitoring the HR community. | |
The roles description I mentioned in my HR Roles Blog is emphazising some of the areas above, mainly focussing on the strategic aspect (I would put Coach, Architect and Facilitator into that category). Here Ulrich and Brockbank explicitly mention that being the employee advocate, e.g. representing employees in management meetings while major decisions are taken is of crucial importance. How employees are treated internally in a company reflects on their behavior to customers and therefor has a direct impact on shareholders.
I personally find it very useful to go back to theory from time to time as it makes me look at some aspects of my work differently. Anyway, the Ulrich roles can be a foundation for more discussion on this topic, be it around practical or theoretical aspects of HR work.
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Posted at
02:15PM Mar 11, 2007
by Volker Seubert in Human Resources |
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HR as a Profit Center
Earlier this week I attended a presentation from Tim-Oliver Goldmann, currently HR Director at twenty4help about “The HR Business Partner in a Profit Center Organization” which was positioned as a concept that gets HR accepted as a “Business Partner”. Really interesting model although it has already been discussed quite extensively in the 90s! I find it still generally compelling as it can help HR to really drive their business and get educated live on business metrics. Imagine your internal clients negotiating pricing of your services with you? Imagine the HR department having a higher margin than the core business (that's where the problems start...)? Conditions to successfully implement are an ERP system to capture the processes, write internal invoices, track revenue and finally make up the P&L of HR. In this case the Customer Service Module of SAP was used.
The example presented was focussed on more operational HR tasks in a production oriented small to medium size company of the automotive supplier industry. The benefits clearly were change managing the turn around of the traditional HR function with the help of the profit center framework.
I personally believe that the recognition of HR with the business can also be achieved differently by implementing partners at higher management levels who can anticipate future business needs with the knowledge of business strategy and then align HR resources to perform on the appropriate HR practices to support this business strategy. From my perspective the profit center administration in itself is too much of an overhead for the limited value it can bring. Most HR functions these days go through the same tough budget planning processes as the business.
This also showed that the position “HR Business Partner” is most probably differently defined in every company.
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Posted at
09:17PM Feb 22, 2007
by Volker Seubert in Human Resources |
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HR Roles
Here comes the summary of the second and main part of Dave Ulrich's article about Human Resources in Virtual Organizations. My blog entry about virtual organizations is describing how the way companies are operating changed as a result of the development of information technology. Taking into account this different environment also the role of the HR professional in companies who underlie those changes needs to adapt.
The role of HR gets more business critical with the complexity of organizations. Examples of required capabilities like an employee shared mind-set to ensure commitment from dispersed employees through common values, an environment of innovation, the ability of sharing ideas across complex boundaries, speed to assure an internal organizational response consistent with external customer demand all demonstrate that competition in the virtual organization comes much more from intellectual capital than before. As a result these companies are much more workforce dependent than in the past.
Ulrich requires HR to act beyond partnership as a Player with 5 different roles: Coach, Architect, Designer, Facilitator and Leader. He does not only describe these roles but also gives first simple instructions and examples how to act in that role.
HR Players coach senior leaders how they can personally build stronger organizations focussing on giving them feedback on their behavior. Taking care of self is an integral part of the coaching relationship.
As organization Architects they shape the way work flows consistent with the ideas and ideals of the business leader. They offer informed choice about different approaches to take based on organization design models like Galbraith's Star Model. HR Players as primary architects of the organization cannot be substituted with external consultants as they better understand the company specific subtleties and political realities that need to be taken into account.
As Designer the HR Player designs and delivers HR practices that both drive and reinforce employee behavior that is consistent with strategy and capability. In order to do this effectively they need to know the latest HR theory, practice and technology. Networking with colleagues and participating in benchmark meetings should be one element to keep knowledge current. In general HR Players should be active learners, constantly screening literature and doing research within their companies.
As Facilitators HR Players make sure things get done long term. They insure that organization change happens. Being a change agent is not enough. HR facilitators are thought leaders, bring together resources, focus attention and make sure decisions are made quickly and accurately. Complementary to the role as coaches facilitators focus on teams, organizations or alliances.
Last but not least HR needs to lead by example. A well lead HR function earns credibility. HR should be led as a business and have a business plan in place that has buy-in by the company leader.
Ulrich is convinced that when HR professionals learn these roles they add enormous value to their firms, their profession and themselves. Today social networking enables us to learn more easily by sharing, even virtually! Let's go for it!
Update: view this blog entry for an update on the HR roles topic.
Posted at
06:00PM Jan 08, 2007
by Volker Seubert in Human Resources |
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The State of HR Outsourcing
The german weekly “Computerwoche” published an article last week entitled: “Is there a european market for HR Outsourcing?”. They refer to a european conference on HR Outsourcing (HRO) held in Brussels beginning of this month (HRO World Europe 2006 - Future-Proof HR Transformation). The provokative intro statement from Euan Davis, Senior Analyst at Forrester was:” There is no market for HR-Outsourcing.”
But how can it be possible then that companies like Hewitt make $1.5 billion in revenue with HRO, 20% done in Europe? Hewitt had become one of the biggest providers for HRO solutions after the acquisition of Exult and was able to close a large number of deals as a consequence. Still in 2005 13 contracts were signed. In another article from “Computerwoche” in August this year Hewitt's former CEO and Chairman Dale Gifford was cited saying that Hewitt took on too many contracts in a short period of time and underestimated the complexity and cost associated with delivering on those contracts. In February this year Hewitt openly stated that the operating margin of the whole company would be impacted by the HRO contracts signed in 2005.
On November 10 Hewitt published the results for the last quarter. Donald Glade takes this up in his blog “ Hewitt's Financial Results, What do they mean?” to analyze the state of the industry. Hewitt's outsourcing business still experiences declining revenue, income and profitability although the overall market of BPO (Business Process Outsourcing) still grows although behind expectations.
In fact many potential buyers evaluate HRO but do not commit themselves over concerns about delivery. Donald refers to an interesting article in “ HRO Today” about this phenomenon. And also the “Computerwoche” article from last week is citing statements of big companies like the german chemical giant Bayer or the British Royal Mail that moving to full outsourcing would be too complex in one step. Streamlining processes internally and then establishing Shared Services Centers could be interim steps to move to a full HR BPO model.
It looks like full HR BPO may not be the most favorite outsourcing alternative companies pursue. Does the overall BPO market growth come more from other directions? Phil Fersht in his guest entry at Jason Corsello's blog writes about “The Great Outsourcing Divide: Where HRO Has Been Challenged, FAO is Blossoming”. He makes the point that HRO is more complex and sensitive as FAO (Finance and Accounting Outsourcing). A company wide HRO initiative impacts the lives of all employees and managers across an entire organization. He furthermore states that “ HRO can negatively impact an entire organization if the relationships between the service provider and the buyer’s governance team are not well defined. This can particularly be the case during the early transition phases post-transaction. Areas of impact, for example the introduction of self service tools and high-touch offshore employee care representatives, need to be managed and communicated extremely diligently.”
Unilever, one of the world's biggest consumer goods businesses outsourced HR to Accenture. At HRO World Europe they were stating that it was difficult to find a provider who could offer global services. “Computerwoche” cites Christian Marchetti, Accenture's Managing Director for the HR Services business stating that it is a competitive advantage to have the willingness, the skills and the experience to adapt to the European diversity that is inherent to big HRO deals. Only few providers could actually prove that they are up to deal with this diversity. As Hewitt, ACS and Convergys some of them admitted to have underestimated the complexity of big outsourcing deals.
Although there is reluctancy to enter into big HR BPO deals according to IDC the HR BPO services business grows at 16% in the US. RPO (Recruitment Process Outsourcing) may be partially the reason for this. A new trend in the US that starts swamping over to Europe. At this stage though most projects in RPO are about simple services around elements of the hiring process. It looks like there are no examples yet of outsourcing of the complete end to end process.
We at Sun are still in the middle of making our outsourcing processes work after tools and hubs went live a couple of months ago. Read more about our approach in my blog about “Our HR Organization” and about an impression of a visit to our hub in “Krakow”. post to del.icio.us
Posted at
03:15PM Nov 25, 2006
by Volker Seubert in Human Resources |
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Virtual Organizations
This week-end I started reading an article from Dave Ulrich about the role of the HR Professional in the Virtual Organization which is Chapter 5 of a book about Human Resources in Virtual Organizations. I mentioned Ulrich in my blog about Our HR Organization as the provider of the organizational framework for the reorganization we did several years ago. In this article dating from 2002 Ulrich sets the stage for the HR work of the 21. century.
New organizational forms have emerged in today's economy: organizations characterized by horizontal structures, organizations that are working as alliances or networks, shared services structures etc. All of them entail a virtual organization.
Why are companies moving to these organizational forms? Through the web all players are more informed than ever. Targeting key customers, searching for the appropriate suppliers has become easier and less costly. Because of these and other transaction costs decreasing with technology the traditional organization looses it's value going from industrial age to information age.
Ronald H. Coase created the transaction cost approach to the theory of the firm. He defines three types of transaction costs:
search and information costs are the costs of finding others to do business with and determining if they could be trusted (suppliers, partners etc.)*
bargaining and decision costs or contracting costs are the costs of lawyers, time for negotiations, etc.
policing and enforcement costs or coordination costs are the costs of making the delivery process work.
*In Masood's blog you can read an interesting discussion about the search transaction costs.
It becomes evident that information technology has decreased all these costs. Through the ease of looking for suppliers worldwide and the ability to track the just in time delivery process many different suppliers nowadays contribute to manufacture a car although in former times a traditional car manufacturer would even have produced tires. Ulrich writes about the corporation in the information age:
“ In the Industrial Age, the corporation was seen primarily as a business unit and production as the business activity. In the information age, both the unit and the activity are displaced; the unit by the “business web” as the primary entity, and fulfillment as the primary business activity (i.e., not just products, but enduring relationships).”
As a result organizations will consist of many dispersed corporate entities with less bureaucratic integration moving away from hierarchical chains of commands, focussing on relationships and delivering a common customer value proposition. While traditional organizations expanded inside until the cost of performing transactions outside exceeded internal cost, virtual organizations shrink until internal transaction cost do no longer exceed external cost. The philosophy has been inverted, the default will more and more be to do work externally. Only when it can be done cheaper inside it will remain within the organization.
An important work to be mentioned is the one of Don Tapscott, David Ticoll, and Alex Lowy, authors of “Digital Capital (2000)”. I am citing out of a conversation done with the authors. On the question why outsourcing would be dead in the world of b-webs (business webs) they replied:
“ The lead firm in a b-web will want to control core elements of its digital capital - like customer relationships, the choreography of value creation and management processes, and intellectual property. Depending on the particulars, partners can take care of everything else”.
And they say on the future of the HR function:
“ As we move into the world of b-webs, the HR profession must reinvent itself. Rather than HR management, we need to think in terms of IHRM - inter-enterprise human resource management - human capital in its internetworked form. Companies must view the employees of their b-web's partners as extensions of their own capital, because competitiveness and customer value creation depend on accumulating and unleashing digital capital in all its forms. This will require a radical rethinking of traditional functions like recruiting, conflict resolution, and compensation.“
I will keep Ulrich's answer on the future shape of HR roles for one of my next blogs...
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Posted at
10:52PM Nov 19, 2006
by Volker Seubert in Human Resources |
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Recruitment 2.0
I came across an interesting article today about how Web 2.0 will profoundly change recruiting as a result of the next generation's behaviors (My Blog is my Resume).
The author states that due to the web addiction of the new generation the access to them needs to be redefined. Recruitment over the web will even increase with a focus on actively looking for new employees in user forums, on social networks, in niche sites or finding them commenting on blogs.
They will not trust any nice marketing messages about company culture but check within their social networks built in the web to verify information. Most possibly they will come across bloggers from that company who will give them better insight than any corporate webpage could ever do. Information cannot be restricted, if a company's work environment is terrible people will learn about it.
This new generation will expect to be judged by their ideas, not their experience. Resumes will become irrelevant. Companies are expected to search the web reading their blogs and those of coworkers referring them and having vouched for their intelligence and work ethic. View this discussion on Robert Scoble's blog.
This maybe a trend in the US today and usually it comes over to Europe after a while. Populations with highly technical skills generally are the first to adopt. So this means we need to adapt our recruiting strategies for software engineers very soon!
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Posted at
10:23PM Nov 07, 2006
by Volker Seubert in Human Resources |
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Krakow
Recently we did an HR team meeting in Krakow. Why Krakow? Because our outsourcing partner built up their European Hub there. Krakow is one of Poland's biggest cities in the south of the country. I had never been to Poland before although Germany has a pretty long boarder with Poland. I lived three years in Dresden (starting up AMD Fab30) which is about a good hour drive from the polish boarder but never made it there.
Business with western European countries has become easier for Poland since it has been integrated into the European union. With each eastern European country added to the union more competition for western European countries is created. Some companies, even some industries really feel threatened about this competition as do the unions and the government. It is all about low cost competition from these emerging economies. The polish companies can offer better deals as in Poland wages and cost of living are still much lower than in Germany. The german government is trying to protect local companies and workers. The unemployment rate is pretty high and there is a lot of pressure to boost the economy and create new jobs.
I personally do not think that protection is the right answer to something that over the next decade will not be able to be stopped anyway. The economies of many eastern European countries are growing at rates beyond 5% per year. They are very competitive due to lower labor cost and a well educated, very motivated workforce. The only chance for the „old“ economies in western Europe is to reinvent themselves, find new specializations and niches, reform their social systems and deregulate the labor market. Some eastern European countries learned quickly through consequently implementing reforms to establish a free market economy, like Slovakia, today with 1 Million cars produced each year one of the most favored locations not only by car manufacturers. The economic environment there is set up in a way to both encourage people to work hard and earn much money and companies to hire people and make money too. Let's see how things will evolve in Slovakia where a new government has been elected in summer and generally in eastern Europe (read this article in the Herald Tribune for an outlook).
This already answers some part of the question, why our outsourcing partner built up their service center in Krakow/Poland. Krakow has more than one million inhabitants, out of them around 100,000 Students! There are plenty of Universities. Krakow has the oldest university in Poland which made the city the cultural and scientific center of eastern Europe in the past. Nicolaus Copernikus who became famous through the first modern formulation of a heliocentric (sun-centered) theory of the solar system studied there. As a result there is a big well educated, young workforce that interestingly has a high affinity to speak foreign languages.
The tour we had through the service center was very impressive. From the nearly 100 people working there more than half were working for ourselves dealing with all the incoming HR queries from 26 different countries in our EMEA region (Europe, Middle-East, Africa). Employees had cards with their names on it on their cubes and flags below showing the languages they spoke. I rarely saw only one flag (and polish was not part!). They are well organized, working very process oriented with appropriate tooling to keep track of the status of incoming queries. The tooling also permits to put in place a knowledge database. Additionally there are specialized groups dealing with Staffing, Compensation & Benefits, etc. I think we can all imagine how complex it is to deal with 26 different countries and in many cases with 26 different processes for one and the same issue and additionally do it in several foreign languages. I was truly impressed about the customer focus, motivation and engagement of this team!
The city itself is really beautiful with on old center grouping around a main square (Rynek Glowny). You feel the vibrant life lingering around the small streets or sitting in one of the many bars and restaurants that are arranged from stylish to cosy with attention to detail. The parks along the city walls invite for a walk (more info on Krakow).
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Posted at
04:32PM Oct 28, 2006
by Volker Seubert in Europe & Beyond |
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Our HR Organization
In the current environment while we are having some trouble and issues around our HR processes and tools at Sun I think it makes sense to give some background on our HR organization. As an HR employee at this time you really do not want to show yourself outside cause you're getting beaten up talking to managers or let's put it this way: you're getting a lot of feed-back on HR. Talking to managers and employees at many of our remote sites also shows that there is little knowledge or even insight in our model and why we are structured like this. Some of them simply missed the history that we were going through.
We are really in the hot phase of our HR Business Process Outsourcing (HR BPO) right now. New processes and tools were established and now need to prove themselves. This is exactly the kind of moment Bill McGowan our Executive VP (Vice President) for People & Places at Sun was describing years back in an HR meeting in Munich. We had just signed the contract with our new vendor and he said: as with all new outsourcing projects there will be a point when things will not go as well as we thought.
I personally believe these are the moments to remind ourselves why we were doing this and what our long-term benefit is moving ahead. Clearly we have gone this way much earlier than most other global companies. And the emphasis really is on “global” as this was and still is one of the major challenges. In general most companies are still in the early stages of fully outsourcing HR processes. I would say that today the setup of our HR organization is probably state of the art compared to the industry.
So how did it all start? How and why did we reinvent our HR Organization?
When I came to Sun nearly 7 years ago here in Germany we where working in a real traditional HR environment. Every HR Manager was working for one LOB (Line of Business) and teamed up with an HR Specialist doing all the transactions and paperwork (still plenty at that time). Whenever anyone called anyone in the HR department he got the person's voice mail. We were all so busy no one could ever answer the phone. It was really pretty chaotic and we needed to improve it.
What we came up with was the first form of a call center structure. We gave one call-in number out to all customers, employees and managers and one mail address. Behind that was a pool of HR Specialists processing all the queries. In parallel we started to enhance the HR webpage. It was a big success, customer feed-back stated high satisfaction rates as finally someone was answering the phone and a response could be given promptly. Additionally we streamlined processes behind the scenes and did small scale outsourcing, e.g. applicant tracking, writing of references (that we are legally obliged to issue in Germany when an employee leaves the company). It was the first step towards a three level support system: 1 st level being the webpage, 2 nd level being the call center and 3 rd level being the HR Manager. This is basically what we have today in a more sophisticated way.
Then Dave Ulrich came into play, a professor who's main purpose is to constantly bring the HR function to the next level of excellence. Our main question now was: how can we add more value to the business? Ulrich in “HR Champions" (with champions he adresses both line managers and HR professionals!) divides the HR function in 4 main responsibilities: the Administrative Expert who makes sure that day to day operational processes function well, the Business Partner who knows where the business is moving to and what HR practices would facilitate the business to excel, the Change Agent who accompanies the shifts in business strategies and takes care about the people impact of those moves and finally the Employee Champion who listens to the employee and can assess their state of motivation (click here for an abstract of Ulrich's HR Champions).
The key was to invert the pyramid, really key words at that time, meaning getting the administrative part of the work so streamlined and effective that the HR Manager could spend more time on consulting clients in organization development, get more to the strategic aspects of HR work.
As a result we needed to create an organization that allowed HR people to spend time on strategic issues with the conditions mentioned above: effective, easy to use processes. We knew that in the area of facilitating processes with an appropriate tooling we were not the best. Pretty much of an investment was needed to bring us where we wanted to be. And we also knew that this money was not to be found within our company. As a consequence of the bubble burst in late 2000 we were in the middle of reinventing the way we were doing business, we were not profitable, our SG&A costs (General Sales and administration costs) were high compared to industry standards. Also the HR function was under a lot of pressure to save costs.
The first step to invert the pyramid was a completely new HR Organization consisting of 4 quadrants based on Ulrich: a small corporate HR strategy function, an HR Country Management organization, an HR Business Partner organization and the Centers of Expertise like compensation & benefits, staffing, training, global inclusion etc. (COEs). The HR country people are responsible for making sure that the administrative part is done well. They now manage our outsourcing partner in this regard. Within each country they are responsible for SMI (Sun Microsystems Inc.) alignment, keeping a consistent standard throughout all our businesses and processes in each country and dealing with all the complex issues of local work law. In Ulrich terms they would also be the Employee Champions. On the other hand there is the HR Business Partner each of them working together with one of our bigger organization leaders. They are responsible for implementing the appropriate HR practices that support business strategy. Their charter is to drive and accompany organizational change which makes them the Change Agents. Putting it in general terms the HR Business Partner would do all aspects of organizational development (organization assessment and design, leadership development, etc.).
The next step was then to do the HR BPO, outsource all administrative processes and let them manage by an outside vendor to guarantee a constant quality of service and process excellence. In order to achieve that the vendor delivers and hosts the required tooling to enable ease of use for all HR processes by Managers and Employees and in fact today we have an incredibly rich portfolio of tools that support basically all relevant HR processes including diverse features for Talent Development which I believe will bring our organizations forward in terms of succession planning and talent management.
To summarize: our main purpose with this model is to drive value add to the business by easy to use processes and sophisticated tools, by having dedicated resources that drive and support organization development and change (I forgot to mention that meanwhile we also have a very small HR Consulting organization working bigger organization development projects with different organizations contributing to this goal!)
Concerning the current situation: we all know how it is to start using a new software, at the beginning you always suffer, first you do not know exactly what all the features are, how they are functioning and second the tool may be an early version, there are bugs, or maybe it does not work properly on your platform. Also the people behind need to get up to speed, acquire a knowledge base to answer questions promptly, they also need to get used to new processes which have been set up but are not proven yet.
I am still as much convinced as before about our model and strongly believe that we can add a lot of value through it to the business over time. We need to overcome the current obstacles and will bring our work and the performance of our company to the next level!
Posted at
01:37PM Oct 19, 2006
by Volker Seubert in Human Resources |
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