Systematically Develop Your HR Department

Create a simplified process that addresses both department-wide and individual employee development needs.

Executive Summary

McLean & Company Insight

HR’s own development often falls to the wayside because of competing priorities and capacity constraints. Use a simple process to assess and address gaps and increase the likelihood of adoption.

Situation

Effective HR departments drive organizational success: organizations that had highly effective HR departments were more likely to achieve organizational goals (McLean & Company, Trends Survey 2019; N=773).

However, many HR departments have not yet reached this level of effectiveness. In fact, only 38% of HR professionals rate their HR department as highly effective, and this is 1.8x more than stakeholders rate their HR departments – meaning stakeholders view their HR departments as less effective than HR views itself (McLean & Company, Trends Survey 2020; N=365)

Complication

The requirements of HR are continuously increasing with the growing needs of stakeholders.

However, HR rarely has the time to focus on its own development to effectively support stakeholder needs. This is often because HR usually spends most of its time prioritizing the needs of employees outside of HR over its own needs. Compounding this is the fact that few HR departments provide internal development opportunities for HR employees (McLean & Company, Trends Survey 2019; N=471).

Solution

Use McLean & Company’s three-step process to identify the competencies key to delivering on the HR department’s priorities, assess the HR team against these competencies, and develop a plan to address competency gaps.

Weigh time, budget, and the size of the competency gap when determining how to address each gap (e.g. by developing the team with department-wide training and individual development plans, bringing new employees with the desired competencies into the HR team, or by exploring offboarding employees who are not able to develop).

Highly effective HR departments positively impact organizational success

An effective HR department is important not just for HR, but for the entire organization:

Organizations that had highly effective HR departments were more likely to achieve their organizational goals (McLean & Company, Trends Survey 2019; N=773).

High-performing HR departments drive organizational impact by:

• Delivering exceptional customer value.
• Responding proactively to disruptive change.
• Driving innovation.
• Attracting the talent the organization needs.
(Mercer (a))

“When HR does it right – when those organisational[sic], social or cultural capabilities are aligned to the technical core competencies which drive the strategy to deliver a pattern of consistent earnings – this raises investor confidence in the future.” (Norm Smallwood (quoted in Bolza))