Partners in strategy
The strategic partner (or human resource strategy) role focuses on aligning human resource strategies and practices with the business strategy and its execution. This demands a high level of human resource and business competence. Human resource pro¬fessionals must be fully conversant with, and have a broad understanding of, the economic, technological and human aspects that make up the organisation’s core capa¬cities that drive successful strategy implementation in their organisations, as well as understanding how the various human resource functions affect those capabilities.41 Senior human resource professionals, with the support of management must become mtrapreneurial' that is, innovate on behalf of the organisation and create an organ¬isational climate and culture that encourages, facilitates and rewards innovation.42 To accomplish this orientation, they need to understand how the organisation’s human capita], which goes beyond traditional knowledge, skills, and abilities to encompass capa¬bilities not directly related to task performance, including experiences and social skills, as well as values, beliefs and attitudes, can contribute to its competitive advantage.43 To gain this level of understanding, they need up-to-date intelligence of the configuration of their employees and their particular strengths and weaknesses, including skills, know¬ledge, culture and values. So line managers are key players in this information-collection strategy, too. Together they must be able to determine how best to use these capabilities, identify what gaps exist between the present configuration and the future skills, know¬ledge, work behaviours, values and attitudes that employees will need to deliver future goals, and which specific human resource strategies will bridge those gaps.
This shift m the roles of human resource professionals — with a move away from purely administrative roles towards the provision of specialist consultancy and strategic support to management — has been noted in the past decade in the United States, Europe and Australia.44 We have seen this for example, in the Holden example, where the human resource function was restructured to allow human resource professionals to operate as strategic partners, change agents and champions, and HR consultants on all strategic human resource matters.45 Not every organisation, however, has structured its human resource function to allow it to operate strategically. The level of human resource input into the planning, formulation and implementation of organisational strategy differs widely across organisations and often between different business units within the same organisation. A recent US study by Lawler and Mohrman from the University of Southern California, found that board representation by HR is relatively low and that there has been little change over the last five years in actual HR practices and the way HR spends its time. However, they reinforce the need for HR to have a structure to ensure that it has the competencies to participate in strategy development and imple¬mentation, change management and organisational effectiveness.46 Australian
Research supports this. A study by HR Magazine found that while not one of the top 100 Aus¬tralian stock exchange listed companies had an HR executive on its board, almost half these companies have HR representation at the executive level.47 But Australian boards operate under different governance models from the United States. There are more non¬executive directors on Australian boards. While it helped having HR representation at board level, Shane Freeman, Group General Manager of Human Capital at ANZ, sug¬gested that it was more important to get HR issues on the board agenda for discussion and decision-making.48
However, more recent research supports the evolving strategic role of HR. A report by Accenture — based on interviews with 200 senior executives in the United States, Europe and Australia — found that these executives listed workforce-related issues as tour of their top five strategic priorities. And perhaps equally encouraging for HR pro¬fessionals and managers (and employees), 74 percent of the executives in this study said that people-related issues are more important to a company’s success now than they were a year ago.49