THE THREATS FACING BUSINESS PARTNER HR IN INDIAN IT

Long back, Ulrich created this 3 stooled model of operations, centers of excellence and business partner. Consider Hindustan Unilever. They have a foods business, cosmetics business, personal hygiene business and so on. Each has different set up for manufacturing, marketing and often customer profile. There is something different between each business, as would be in a company like L&T.

For a long time, the business partner roles were limited in Indian IT. Anyway, HR was mostly recruitment and compensation. A few sincere people would co-ordinate staffing, and the seasonal appraisals and all was well. However, once the industry moved to a period of incremental growth on a larger base, efficiency measures like goal-setting, normalization, lay-offs became more important needing more senior HR pros. But are they business partners or even HR generalists?

Let us take the Unilever example forward. IT services business can be broadly classified into the following boundaries

• Consulting, technology and business services. Each of this calls for a different workforce.
• India and International; especially the local compliance requirements of each country is somewhat different.
• Centers within India, each with a slightly different, local flavour.

The company may be organized for client facing reasons into BFSI, Retail, Energy and Utilities and so on and workforce allocated accordingly. However, to put it very simply it is about a person creating a presentation, taking a call or coding in front of a machine. The content might vary a little bit based on the domain, but the workforce nature does not change from a vertical to another.

However, most companies had gone with a business partner structure aligned to BU s. This has in turn entrenched a HR to Headcount ratio based organization structure; 1 HR Partner for every 300 employees and so on.  This exposes two lacunae.

• A HRG has limited impact on either an employee’s performance or on engagement. So, the focus is on creating events, one on ones, skip level meetings and so on to find the pulse of employees. HRG can flow information up and down, but can’t decide on anything.
• There is no study which has established a correlation between business partner HR and business performance. I am yet to hear a CEO say “Our retention went up due to our extensive HR partner coverage and competence.”

There used to be a time for the business partner to act as “Eyes and Ears” to the big people telling them about engagement trends. But these days, you have social networks and instant polling facilities that help track this more actively. So, the business partner’s intelligence is limited to

• Employees are not happy/ not unhappy with pay raise except in a few pockets.
• Many employees are going for interviews with this competitor.
• This manager sucks in people management.

In parallel, the IT services companies created “Delivery Management” roles, that essentially added limited value and were more like hubs through which information passed through. Leaders in at least two companies have been making readjustments that seek to eliminate this layer. They could not see a RoI on this investment.

Same logic applies to HRGs who are definitely as sincere and busy as the aforementioned Delivery Managers, but are not in a position to have an impact.

Using a football analogy, the HR BP is like mid-fielders in football; they act as the link between the defenders and the shooters. However, when required, the mid-fielders go back to win the ball or go forward to score a goal. They need more skill-sets than just passing the ball around.

So, what should the BP HR really do?

1. Companies should stop doing this 1:200 ratio and creating work. MNCs are managing to much higher ratios, as they pay well and the work is good; If you don’t do either well, increasing the number of HRGs does not help.
2. There is some scope at the entry level, where a stint as a business partner helps to get an appreciation of business.
3. All businesses have challenges of coaching leaders, bonding teams and improving engagement. The shift needed is

PROBLEM	CURRENT SOLUTION	IDEAL SOLUTION
Manager is bad	Inform leadership	Coach the manager
Team is not working well	Inform L&D	Build the team
Team is not working well	Outing to a resort	Build the team
Appraisals are delayed	Chase like mad to complete	Align process to business needs
Unhappiness with salary	Escalate to management	Understand the business drivers and plot solutions

As you see here, the business partnering needs to be simple, lean and trusted. Business partnering is not passing the ball around, but developing capabilities so that challenges are handled at the local level. Leave event management, follow up to corporate roles and have an impact.

Often the BP HR acts as the trusted confidante to the Delivery leadership, reflecting their thoughts and ingesting their cynicism. A solution oriented approach will prevent the function from sharing the fate of the “Delivery Management”!