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 have highly effective HR departments are more likely to be high performing in key areas including innovation, workforce productivity, and ability to change (McLean & Company, 2022 Trends Survey; N=799-808).

However, many HR departments have not yet reached this level of effectiveness. In fact, only 54% of HR professionals rate their HR department as highly effective, and this is 1.6x greater than the percent of stakeholders rating their HR departments as highly effective – meaning stakeholders view their HR departments as less effective than HR views itself (McLean & Company, 2022 Trends Survey; N=378-431).

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 spends most of its time prioritizing the needs of employees outside of HR over its own needs. Compounding this is the fact that few organizations provide HR with opportunities to develop strategic HR competencies (McLean & Company, 2022 Trends Survey; N=353).

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 whose HR departments are highly effective are more likely to be high performing in the following key organizational performance parameters:

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.

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)

(McLean & Company, 2022 Trends Survey; N=799-808).