JEDDAH — High-performing human resources (HR) departments help to drive the financial performance of companies, a recent report released by The Boston Consulting Group (BCG) and the World Federation of People Management Associations (WFPMA) revealed. The study titled “How to Set Up Great HR Functions: Connect, Prioritize, and Impact” explores emerging trends in HR.
Looking at the 10-year stock performances of the public companies in Fortune magazine's “Best Companies to Work For” rankings in 2014, and compared them with the S&P 500 Index, the 100 best companies – those with the strongest HR performance – outperformed the index by nearly 100 percentage points. However, the report noted that this is the case only if HR leaders are equipped to partner with business leaders.
“HR functions need to connect by partnering with stakeholders both inside and, increasingly, outside of the company to improve operational and financial performance,” said Jean-Michel Caye, a Senior Partner at BCG and a co-author of the report.
To highlight the biggest priorities for companies in different regions and industries, authors looked into 27 HR subtopics.
The majority of countries ranked leadership as the subtopic most urgently in need of action, followed by talent management.
There were considerable differences, however, in the rankings of subtopics across countries.
In the Middle East, the focus is High-performing human resources (HR) departments help to drive the financial performance of companies, a recent report released by The Boston Consulting Group (BCG) and the World Federation of People Management Associations (WFPMA) revealed. primarily on talent management followed by leadership, and behavior and culture.
Other areas of focus include employee engagement, career models and competencies, rewards and recognition, training and learning, HR communication, HR services and systems, employer branding, HR and people strategy, performance management, strategic workforce planning, and recruiting processes.
“Interestingly, performance management ranks considerably lower, in terms of urgency, across most of the other countries,” added Christopher Daniel, a Principal at BCG's Dubai office. “In fact, no other country mentioned it among its top three most urgent subtopics. This indicates that HR leaders in the Middle East need to make substantial progress in this particular department.”
The report underscores the importance of a clear link between HR and business leaders, which the survey data indicates may be significantly missing at some organizations.
“Non-HR respondents rated their company's people-management capabilities as significantly lower than HR respondents ranked their own performance,” said Jorge Jauregui, recently appointed the new President of the WFPMA.
Of the 27 HR areas that the paper explores, non-HR respondents ranked 40 percent in the “red zone,” indicating a significant need for action. By contrast, HR respondents did not rank any HR areas in the red zone.
The report also segmented the best-performing and worst-performing companies based on their average revenue changes and operating margins, and identified common themes in each group. The most notable finding was that HR departments at financially top-performing companies are able to identify clear priorities to improve their HR performance and therefore target their investments and future efforts much more effectively.
“Companies with lower financial performance adopt a more arbitrary approach to investments in HR topics,” stated Daniel. “They don't identify clear priorities, and they don't focus their investments.”
Perhaps not surprisingly, given the growing availability of analytics and other data-driven approaches to management, the findings also showed a strong correlation between the use of HR key performance indicators (KPIs) and analytics and a more strategic role for HR overall.
The message for HR leaders is clear: those who want a seat at the table during strategic deliberations with C-level executives must be able to assess – and communicate – the performance of the workforce. This entails going beyond rudimentary metrics that look at things such as personnel cost and headcount, and toward more sophisticated output indicators, which can gauge employee productivity and other critical data.
“Companies need to create an impact by using KPIs and steering tools to support the organization and its strategic goals and by concentrating on developing talent pipelines and shaping organizational behaviors,” added Pieter Haen, the past President of the WFPMA. — SG
