By Sian Harrington – hrmagazine.co.uk
It is timely to revisit the question in this July issue. For not only do we announce the winners of the HR Excellence Awards 2013, for which one of the core criteria is evidence of business impact, but I am handing over the editorship as I take a wider role in my business – one that requires me to think strategically. I have always considered that if an HR professional cannot prove the business value of an intervention then he or she should not be considering that intervention in the first place. And that HR, like all functions, should be aligned to an organisation’s future direction – or what Thomson Reuters senior VP of organisational effectiveness and HR operations Mark Sandham simply calls “understanding where the business is heading”. Contrary to what some seem to think, this is not deep thinking or a strategic approach – it is just common business sense. Yet research paper after research paper finds people in HR to be wanting when it comes to contribution to business strategy.
There are plenty of articles and opinions on why this is the case, many of them carried in the pages of this publication. Three stand out to me: the lack of an evidence-based approach in HR; the focus on best practice and what Mike Haffenden from Corporate Research Forum describes as “chasing quick fixes with glib, meaningless titles”; and a widespread lack of commercial acumen in HR. Let’s focus on the first. As HR magazine’s own HR Most Influential ranking shows, HR directors embrace academics and thinkers. They like fresh and crystallised ideas, models and frameworks. Yet many HR professionals are not acting on the evidence uncovered in academic research. In 2000, Pfeffer and Sutton argued the gap between research and practice is a “knowing-doing” gap rather than a “knowing” gap.
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Plain & Simple 