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Energy companies have explored and, in many cases, initiated leading practice human resources (HR) service delivery frameworks. These models centralize administrative and transactional activities in an employee service center as well as combine programmatic activities into centers of expertise. This approach is often referred to collectively as shared services. A key selling point of this model is that site-based generalists or business partners, relieved of time consuming administrative burdens, can be more strategic. Unfortunately, simply shifting administrative work to a service center does not elevate a business partner to a trusted advisor for management; therefore, many transformations falter. The shift to a leading practice HR service delivery framework requires a structured approach to overhauling and elevating the business partner role; however, most energy companies tend to focus the transformation on the design, build, and launch of the employee service center and fail to make critical changes to the business partner role.

Five Key Steps

To ensure the full implementation of a leading practice HR service delivery model, energy companies should follow these five steps:

• Define the business partner's role, including detailed activities and required skill sets
• Evaluate current business partners against the required skill sets
• Develop or transition business partners with skill deficiencies
• Remove administrative "pathways" from the business partner's reach
• Develop processes that position the new business partner to be successful in an advisement role

The first three steps are intuitive, especially for the HR function; however, few energy company HR groups thoroughly apply these steps. Instead, the tendency is to attempt the transformation with existing business partners -- often the same resources that have become adept at handling the administrative elements of HR but are unskilled at advisement. The result is failure -- employees are confused regarding where to turn for service, manager's view of HR as a non-strategic, policing function is intensified, and the investment in the new service center and technology is underutilized.

Role and Job Definition

The specific HR activities -- employee service center, centers of expertise, and business partner -- should be defined for the entire HR service delivery model at the outset of a transformation. These detailed work activities highlight integration points among service delivery channels and drive the redesign of HR processes. A sample is shown in Figure 1.

The new business partner job and the required skills also need to be defined. A thorough job definition sets the stage for evaluation of current staff and the formulation of development plans. While opinions may vary, we find that nine skills are essential for a strategic business partner: knowledge of the business, analytical, problem-solving, communication, self-directedness, ability to deal with ambiguity, adaptability, organization, and teamwork (see Figure 2). These skills allow the business partner to view unique and unbounded situations and readily formulate effective responses that managers understand, support, and value. These skills, of course, augment the broad knowledge of HR essential for a successful business partner.

Business Skills Evaluation

Whether or not the HR function is planning to retain current employees or hire new staff, evaluating candidates against the defined business partner competencies is critical to the success of a transformation. Formal interviews using skill-based questions are an ideal way to initiate this process. In this approach, a standard HR interview team that meets with all candidates produces the best results. Candidate feedback should not be limited to interviewers within HR. Business leadership -- the business partner's key customer -- should play a significant role in the evaluation. For both internal and external candidates, business leadership feedback provides an additional evaluation data point and helps ensure a good fit between the business and the business partner.

Interviews of potential business partners should be structured as two-way processes. For most organizations undergoing a transformation, the overhauled business partner position will present a dramatic departure in responsibilities for current staff. It is important that candidates understand the job and performance expectations in order to accurately assess their own fit. Many organizations inside and outside the energy sector provide less than accurate pictures of the job that awaits new business partners. This results in high voluntary and involuntary turnover of new business partners -- often in the 20-40 percent range -- within the first two years of transformation.

Development or Transition

Unfortunately, it is not uncommon for energy companies to appoint inadequately skilled individuals to business partner roles. Instead, these individuals should be relocated to organization positions for which they are qualified or transitioned from the company. The loyal cultures and historically long tenure of energy companies make transition and, to some extent, development difficult to achieve, but it is critical to the success of a leading practice HR service delivery model.

Development is an approach that is recommended for business partner candidates who require sharpening of just one or two skills. The difficulty with developing business partner candidates is that many of the desired skills are not easily taught. Analytical skills, for example, are developed and honed through years of experience and practice by individuals who, from the start, have natural analytical predispositions. Of the nine critical business partner skills, business knowledge, communication, organization, and teamwork may be the easiest to grow or refine in an individual. Placing an individual who has skill deficiencies in analytical, problem-solving, self-directedness, ability to deal with ambiguity, or adaptability areas is likely to lead to customer disappointment and the individual's failure.

Even business partners without skill deficiencies can improve. It is important to the long-term success of the new service delivery model that skills be assessed and all staff developed at a collective and individual level. Collectively, the HR group should identify skill improvement areas that exist throughout the function or across specific positions and build programs to close these gaps. All too often, however, the cobbler's children have no shoes, and HR goes without the development programs that it readily offers its customers.

Remove Administrative Pathways

No matter how skilled your business partners, they will always be tempted to revert to old habits, such as helping with a basic question, processing a transaction, or performing other work best suited for the employee service center, because the human resource function is a service organization. Often, however, the business partner should not be performing the requested service in the new service delivery model.

To stem temptation, the HR function should remove as many administrative and transactional pathways as possible from the business partner's control. For example, removing access to the company's HRIS prevents the business partner from making indicative data changes. Other common pathways include permission to initiate or approve requisitions, compensation changes, or status changes; the ability to run certain reports; or the opportunity to initiate payroll-related requests on behalf of employees.

Training employees on the capabilities of the service center and self service will also help reduce administrative burdens on an organization's new business partners and should not be overlooked. In addition, the establishment of robust baseline metrics for questions and transactions and constant monitoring of self service and service center performance will highlight activities that may not have transitioned completely. If comparisons of current self service and service center volumes to historical transaction levels indicate a decline, it often indicates that business partners are continuing to perform these activities. Robust metrics by service, activity, and organizational unit can pinpoint where follow-up work is required to ensure success of the transformation and the business partner role.

Business Partner Tools and Processes

The step that requires the most effort and innovation is the creation of processes and tools to ensure the success of the business partner role and incumbent. This step is difficult for numerous reasons. First, the HR function has to determine the right tools to construct. Tools need to align with a business need and in-place processes. For example, in the energy industry, many companies are facing the retirement of significant numbers of long-tenured workers. According to U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics data, the number of energy industry workers aged 45-54 has increased 30 percent since 1995, and the number of workers aged 55-64 has more than doubled. During the same period, the segment of energy industry workers aged 25-44 has contracted by nearly 30 percent. For most energy companies, this presents a significant issue that needs immediate attention. It also falls squarely in the lap of HR.

HR can develop and deploy processes and tools for workforce planning and knowledge transfer to begin to address the loss of long-tenured workers. Again, success is predicated on identifying the business need and aligning a process and/or tool with it. Unfortunately, all too often HR just builds the process or tool.

Second, and related, the HR function and the business partner must produce and stress "wins" that their processes and tools create. What does the process or tool do to further business goals? This must be demonstrated soon after deployment. For example, the prediction of upcoming hiring needs through a workforce planning process can reduce a business' time-to-fill, maintain productivity, and ensure that business processes such as a planned outage run smoothly. There is no better way to earn respect and become a trusted advisor than to prove that interventions produce results for the business.

Part of proving results is developing and tracking metrics. As with most business partner activities, the key is linking these metrics to the operation of the business. For example, showing that a reduction in grievances results in higher productivity and specific business unit results is meaningful to a leader or manager. Taking the next step and producing business analytics from available data can help a manager make decisions and run his or her business for maximum production. A recent client, through measurement and data mining, was able to demonstrate that the higher turnover of newly hired skilled workers was directly tied to the individual's initial training period. Detailed exit interviews with voluntarily terminated employees helped pinpoint specifics about the program that needed to be changed. Acting on the findings from this data cut turnover, increased productivity, and allowed managers to shift their focus away from constant recruiting to the business and business issues.

Finally, for the overall success of the HR function and the business partner role, mechanisms must be established to share key learnings and codify leading practices established within a business. These mechanisms keep the decentralized elements of HR synched and ensure strategic value is leveraged. Several mechanisms, such as routine knowledge transfer sessions, syntheses of data at functional centers of expertise, and candid feedback sessions from business managers, help foster HR's value across the business.

Summary

The transformation of the HR function to a leading practice model takes significant effort and resources. Too often the implementation is predominately focused on the employee service center. A strong focus on the service center is important to the success of the transformation, especially since this organization is the primary interface point with employees; but the service center also garners significant implementation attention because the approaches for its development and launch are structured and tactical in nature.

The construction of a strong, highly skilled, respected cadre of business partners is anything but structured or tactical. For this reason, the transformation of the business partner role generally receives much less attention during a leading practice service delivery model implementation; however, it is the business partner role that fosters leadership support of HR. It is also the place where the HR function can add tremendous value to the achievement of business goals.

Adding the approach outlined in this article to a transformation will create a strong complement of business partners and ensure the success of a leading practice HR service delivery model. A successful service delivery model will achieve cost and quality goals and, most importantly, position HR as a valued partner to the business.

FIGURE 2