Presentation at BOC's Reinventing HR Summit December 2018

1. Jon Ingham (@joningham)
Building Better HR Departments

2. Introduction
Jon Ingham
• 25 years in strategic HR
• Experience working as an International HR Director
• Consultant, researcher, author, blogger, speaker…
• A strategic perspective to all areas of people management
and organisation development
• Co-author with Dave Ulrich of ‘Building Better HR
Departments’ (2016)
• Author of ‘The Social Organization’ (2017)
• UK based but working globally
https://www.joningham.com/better-hr-departments.html

3. Context
Individuals to Groups
• Need for specialists vs problems increasingly complex
• CEB 20-50% collaborative vs individual work over 10 years
• HR competencies è HR departments
Why? What?
How? Who?

4. Why?
Activity
• Resourcing
• Development
• Management
• Organisation
Outcome
• Human
• Organisation
• and Social
Capital
Bus Impact
• Operations
• Customers
• Financial
• Mission

5. What?
Connections
Relationships
Conversations
Within the
Business
HR to
Stakeholders
Within HR

6. Task focus,
Extrinsic motivation
Human focus,
Intrinsic motivation
Internal
orientation,
Exploitation of
existing
resources
External
orientation,
Exploration of
new
opportunities Networks
Communities
Hierarchical
Functions
Horizontal
Teams
©Jon Ingham, 2018
‘The Social Organization’, http://koganpage.com/SocialOrganization
What?

7. How?
Jon Ingham and Dave Ulrich, Building Better HR Departments
https://www.joningham.com/better-hr-departments.html
Business organisation form HR organisation form
Centralized functional organisation HR organised around HR
specialties
Horizontal process / project based
organisation
HR operating in multi-functional
teams
Community based organisation
HR professional groups
Network based organisation HR professionals connected across
organisation
Decentralized independent
businesses
HR specialists operating within each
business unit
Related / diversified organisation HR organised as a professional
services firm

8. How?
Drivers for decentralisation
Driversforcentralisation
H
H
L
L
Centre of
Excellence
Shared
Services
Embedded
HR
Functions
Networks
Project
Teams
Communities
Jon Ingham whitepaper ‘Beyond the Ulrich model’

9. How?
HR Projects (Agile)
• Teams are the focus, not individuals
• Team dynamics / OD are the key
• Organization change – trying to make all this happen
• It may be a hard sell with many top executives who
often believe that individuals are what counts and
competition drives success - Will that beat the need for
innovation?
Source: Peter Cappelli, The New Rules of Talent Management:
HR Goes Agile - Harvard Business Review

10. How?
HR Communities
It is time to redefine the
“CoE”. “Centers of
Excellence” is old and
over. New is “Community
of Expertise,” enterprise-
wide communities with a
balance of centralized and
virtual/business-
embedded resources with
deep expertise.
Source: Deloitte High Impact HR Operating Model

11. How?
HR Networks
The networks permits a level of individualism, creativity and innovation
that the hierarchical organisation simply cannot provide.
Informal
networks of
change agents
operate under
the hierarchical
radar to make
something new
happen faster.
Source: John Kotter, XLR8

12. Who?
= business teams
= business communities

13. Who?
= central disciplines network
HR
IT Property
Procure
-ment Market
-ing

14. • Global communities of practice
in which practitioners in their
field share knowledge and best
practices and even co-create
new models and platforms.
• Pool of professionals fully
dedicated to execute projects
or build new solutions in
multidisciplinary teams with
autonomy to organize their
work and end-to-end
accountability and capacity to
execute.
Case Study: BBVA
(Learn From, Don’t Copy!)
https://www.bbva.com/en/opinion/hr-goes-agile-case-study-bbva/

15. • Building better HR departments requires understanding the
new group focused context we work within, and then
answering the questions why, what, how and who for our own
organisations
• However, this is likely to mean that there will no longer be an
HR ‘department’!
• Department comes from a functional perspective
• Communities and projects are likely to work on both
business and HR issues
• Networks need to involve other disciplines too
• We need to start thinking about Building Better People and
Organisation Management / Development disciplines instead!
Summary

16. For More Information
Email: jon@joningham.com
About me: joningham.com
Strategic Dynamics Ltd: strategicdynamics.co.uk
Strategic Human Capital Management: strategic-hcm.com /
strategic-hcm.blogspot.com
The Social Organization: organization.social
linkedin.com/in/joningham
twitter.com/joningham
Phone: +44 7904 185134