Whether you work in human resources or aspire to have a career in HR, you may be wondering:
what is an HR business partner and what do they do? Hi, I’m Erik from AIHR and in this video,
you will get all these questions answered. But before we start, please smash that like
button and make sure to subscribe so you don’t miss out on any valuable HR insights!
Imagine you’re working as the HR director of a big enterprise and you receive a
report that shows that engagement scores in the supply chain department are at an
all-time low. Employees aren’t motivated, show up late, and quit at a higher rate.
As a result, the department is spending time and money on recruiting and training new staff,
and, more importantly, is at risk of missing its financial targets! You need to know why this is
happening, but who do you, as the HR director, ask to diagnose and help solve the problem? You
need someone who understands both the business and the people side of the business, who has excellent
communication skills, and who can coach managers. In other words, you need an HR business partner!
So what is an HR Business Partner? An HR business partner, also known as an HRBP, is
a senior HR professional with a deep understanding of how HR can make the business more successful.
An HR business partner is usually responsible for a few hundred to a few thousand employees.
They share responsibility for these employees with the employees' direct managers, also known as line
managers. HR business partners work together with line managers to create a productive workforce.
Good HRBPs are able to align HR activities with the needs of the business.
This means that they understand which HR activities should be implemented
to reach business objectives. This helps them provide value to internal business stakeholders,
such as managers, employees, and shareholders, as well as long-term value for the organization.
For example, if the VP of production is looking to open up a new factory abroad,
the HR business partner needs to understand how they can contribute. They can, for example,
analyze the availability of skilled workers in the countries the VP is considering and analyze
the level of competition from other organizations in gaining a skilled workforce. This enables them
to give the VP advice on which location is preferable from a human capital standpoint.
As you can see, the HR business partner is a strategic professional who crafts and implements
company-wide strategies to business challenges. They also measure and
monitor existing policies and procedures, and provide immediate fixes wherever needed.
Before discussing the four essential competencies an HR Business Partner needs, and what these have
to do with flying an airplane, you need to know about the three main responsibilities of HRBPs.
The HR business partner has a wide variety of tasks and responsibilities. The exact
tasks will depend on the organization and on how strategic the business partner role is. However,
in general, they have three roles: the strategic partner, the credible coach, and the relations
manager. Let’s dive into all three of them and what they mean for you as an HR business partner.
As a strategic partner, you drive business value and help prioritize
business needs. For example, should HR invest in a new performance management system,
onboarding practices, or focus on retention instead? What you prioritize depends on the
business needs. By having regular meetings with your business leaders,
you understand how you can best support their deliverables and co-create business value.
As a credible coach, you consult and coach the line managers on their people issues.
You have to choose when to coach the managers and what to coach them on.
Here you can play a key role in building a strong culture and better people practices
through training the company’s leaders who are most responsible for people’s success.
As a relationship manager, you manage the relationship between the employer
and the employees, work councils, and other employee representation groups.
This means that you may be involved in collective bargaining but also in
time-sensitive issues like theft, fraud, health and safety incidents, and workplace misconduct.
In large organizations, you will always have a team behind you that can take care of the
more administrative tasks. This means that you can focus on the high-impact
and strategic workforce challenges while HR shared services and the specialized
HR center of expertise can assist in solving the more administrative, day-to-day challenges.
Now that you know about the three main roles of an HR Business Partner, let’s look at the four
essential competencies that every HRBP needs. After that, we’ll dive into a typical day in
the life of an HRBP. But before we do, if you’re enjoying this video so far, you know what to do.
I always like to compare the four essential HRBP competencies to piloting an airplane. When flying
an airplane you need to know where you are headed because this determines all the actions you take.
As an HR business partner, this means that you need to understand what the business is trying to
achieve. Only then can you give good advice. Being a good navigator means having business acumen.
Second, you need to be able to rely on your visual cues.
You need to be able to read your co-pilot and have a feeling of how the people
insíde the airplane are doing. They are your most important customers. This means that you
understand people, culture, and are an excellent communicator. We call this people advocacy.
You also have a big dashboard with your flight instruments. These include an altitude meter,
an airspeed indicator, a heading indicator, and a turn indicator. These measures tell you
how you are doing and when you need to intervene when things go wrong. These are like your HR
dashboards which display KPIs like engagement, employee turnover, and business data. As a
business partner, you need data literacy to read, interpret, and act on this data.
Lastly, for the majority of the flight, the airplane is on autopilot. You need to understand
this technology and know when you can rely on it, but you also need to know when to disengage it.
This is called digital integration. As an HR business partner, you need to know
when you can rely on technology to streamline processes
and make HR decisions, but also where you need to step in yourself to solve problems.
With these four competencies, which are business acumen, people advocacy, data literacy,
and digital integration, you will be an excellent HRBP
and possess the foundations to become an all-around, T-Shaped HR Professional.
I’ve told you what an HRBP does and what competencies they need,
so let’s dive into what a typical day in the life of an HR Business Partner
actually looks like. To give you a better picture, I interviewed a real-life HR business partner.
Phil works in a fast-moving consumer goods company and I asked him to describe his workday!
Phil manages about eight hundred employees in the supply chain division of his organization.
Here’s an example of a random Tuesday as he describes it:
“After making my way to the office, I start the day by going through my email.
As a business partner, you need to stay up to date on any time-sensitive issues. A couple of
weeks ago an employee was fired for harassment and this led to an internal investigation.
This is a project I am monitoring closely as it may affect the well-being of employees,
the legitimacy of management, and the reputation of the company. Fortunately, it seems to be an
isolated incident and I spend the rest of my morning preparing for my afternoon meetings.
“During lunch, I have a meeting with a particularly busy operations and integration
manager who joined the company a couple of months ago. She explains that she is struggling
to guarantee 99.5% production uptime, which is her KPI. Workers often change their schedule
last-minute, leading to confusion, late arrivals, and sometimes even missed shifts. All of this can
lead to downtime and production errors. I then briefly coaches her on how she could provide
effective feedback to late-arriving employees. I also write down to talk to a few of these workers
to see what the problem is, review the parameters of the scheduling software, and check in on the
recruitment pipeline, as each of these is key to ensuring that the right people were at the
right place at the right time. This is how I, as a BP, can help the manager achieve their goals.
“Next up I have a workgroup on automation of the supply chain. I am involved because supply
chain automation will impact a big part of the work population I’m responsible for.
Great communication, as well as upskilling, will be crucial to making this transformation
a success. Later that day I meet with the purchasing manager and I meet virtually
with the head of learning & development to update him on the progress of the automation workgroup.
The company is investing in automation as well as upskilling of high-performing staff to ensure
that they remain relevant and are able to stay employed as the skills requirement evolves.
HR plays a key role in this process by ensuring great communication, guiding the transformation,
helping people to upskill and reskill, as well as managing internal relocations.”
Phil described a full and action-packed day where, as an HR business partner,
he worked on a number of urgent operational activities. He dealt with a harassment case,
coached a line manager on how to give feedback, worked on tactical and strategic issues such
as ensuring uptime, workplace automation, and enabling an upcoming transformation. Do
you think you’d like your workday to look like Phil’s? Let me know in the comments!
Phil is a great example of a good HR business partner. He is an HR professional with a lot of
experience, who focuses on high-impact people issues. He knows how to strategically align HR
activities to drive the business’ success. Phil uses his airplane piloting skills, specifically
his strong understanding of the business, people, data, and technology to get the business closer
to its goals. Now, I really want to make a joke here but, unfortunately, HR did not approve.
That’s it for the HR business partner. If you have any questions about the HR business partner,
feel free to leave a comment below the video. If you found this video helpful, don’t forget to give
this video a thumbs up and make sure to subscribe so you don’t miss out on any HR insights!
And, if I spark your curiosity, check out the courses at the Academy to Innovate HR.
The link is in the description. I hope you have an absolutely brilliant day. Bye-bye.