Summary Notes: The Critical Skills of Business Partners

On November 29^th, CRF hosted an online discussion for senior members of the HR Business Partner (HRBP) community. Chaired by Emma Lucas, Founder at Think Coaching Ltd, and Will Pemberton, Digital Content and Events Manager at CRF, the session included key insights from recent CRF research and related experiences and expertise shared by practitioners. Discussion topics included future trends impacting business partners, the capabilities that effective HRBPs will require, the challenges that they will need to overcome, and recommendations for developing capabilities. This summary shares key insights from the discussion.

CRF Research Overview: Business Partnering Trends and Future Capabilities Skills

Emma Lucas outlined the five trends that CRF research highlighted as most significantly impacting HRBPs in the coming years, emphasising the increasing complexity and demands of their role.

• Preparing the organisation for technology-driven transformation, considering how technology will change future operating models and ways of working, and supporting organisations to deal with technological transformation in addition to all the other changes they are navigating.  
• Increasing digitalisation, automation and AI enablement of HR. HRBPs need to be up to date on constantly changing technological systems and how they input and extract good quality data from systems, as well as consider how AI is changing the offering of HR practitioners.
• Identifying and developing talent as talent partners on a daily basis (rather than through an annual talent review cycle), feeding relevant information back to the business.
• Responding to the changing social agenda. Employees are displaying increasing social activism in response to world events and there are growing expectations that CEOs become more vocal and active regarding social affairs. HRBPs will need to support leaders to step forward into this challenging conversation, identify what is emerging in the ESG agenda, and pay attention to what is supporting and what is blocking the creation of a more progressive organisation.
• Increasing need for user-centred and tailored HR services to respond to a multi-generational and multi-cultural employee population. HRBPs will also need to support COEs in keeping end users centred in design.

Emma shared CRF’s Effective Business Partnering Framework of ten complementary capabilities that will be particularly critical in meeting the changing requirements of the role. The research also showed that HRBPs typically underestimate their own development needs, with a particularly high discrepancy between how HRBPs rate their own competencies in strategic thinking and how their senior leaders did.

Session participants completed a poll asking them which critical capabilities are their greatest focus, with the highest priority capabilities for HRBPs emerging as strategic thinking, being data-oriented and acting as change agents. Participants also shared that the following capabilities are important for HRBPs within their organisations:

• Crisis response skills. Dealing with crises such as Covid-19 and natural disasters has highlighted the need for real-time responses and the importance of applying learning from previous experiences.
• Being an employee champion.
• Acting as the moral compass of the business.
• Enabling significant cultural change.
• Communicating with confidence.

Challenges In Developing Future-Ready Business Partners
Participants shared the main challenges they are facing in developing future-ready business partners, summarised below.

• Time constraints. A high volume of operational activity and high pressure to execute means that HRBPs often have insufficient learning or reflection time for their personal development.
• Lack of budget or prioritisation due to business cost pressures and leadership sometimes being unfamiliar with the benefits that business partnering can offer.
• Difficulties in applying strategic thinking due to a lack of understanding of what being strategic actually means, pressure to focus on operational rather than strategic issues, and senior leadership itself not focusing on strategic thinking.
• Various issues regarding data use, including understanding what data the organisation specifically requires to support their business goals, ensuring that the data is accessible and of good quality, and that HRBPs have the capability to confidently use it.
• Difficulties in identifying skills gaps in relation to what the business needs, particularly over the longer term.
• Lack of alignment between what the business and what HR views the HRBP role should be, as well as a lack of consensus over what ‘good’ looks like.
• HR systems or organisational structures which do not support the role of the HRBP.

Successes and Recommendations for Developing HRBP Capabilities
During the session, members additionally shared their successful experiences and recommendations for developing HRBP capabilities:

• Allocating more resources to back office functions to create more space for HR to prioritise strategic business partnering.
• Clarifying what strategic thinking actually means to the organisation and what therefore is expected of HRBPs.
• Improving leadership capabilities and supporting culture transformation where necessary to encourage leaders to lead and be people managers.
• One participant shared their organisation’s efforts to revolutionise their HR systems and platforms, introducing self-service platforms for employees and managers to improve HR operations and services. This required significant investment but allows business partners to focus on strategic tasks and also means employees can access responses to their queries more quickly. The organisation also favoured specialist expertise over numerous generalist role and brought data to the fore.

Further Resources
CRF. 2023. Reimagining Business Partnering https://www.crforum.co.uk/hubs/reimagining-hr-business-partnering
CRF Learning. Effective Business Partnering On Demand Course https://crflearning.co.uk/course/business-partnering

The next HR Business Partnering community event will take place on 8^th February 2024, with the topic to be shared in due course.

If you have any further questions please contact Will Pemberton, Digital Content and Events Manager will@crforum.co.uk