hr restrurung

8/7/2019 hr restrurung

1/4

In the last year many of our research members and clients have come to us for help in

restructuring their HR or Learning & Development organizations. There have been three

major forces at play here.

1. Reducing costs: In nearly every industry organizations are going through

restructuring, mergers, or other cost-cutting efforts. The HR department plays a major role

in these changes both by facilitating these changes and by eliminating duplication in its

own operations. Consider the merger of two regional Banks we just worked with: both had

talent management teams, both had compensation, diversity, and compliance

organizations.

Well the decision about what to cut and how to reorganize were not easy: one of these

banks focused on high net-worth individuals and small businesses, so it had a large

workforce of account and portfolio managers providing customized services. The other was

a more traditional retail bank, staffed largely by people dealing with retail clients.

Bottom line: the combined organization design required a sharp and focused look at the

new workforce strategy, the key competencies and capabilities in place, and which of the HR

teams had the expertise and understanding to execute the new combined banks

strategies. Some of the operations went to the traditional retail banking HR leaders, others

(talent management, for example) went to the HR leaders from the smaller, acquired

organization.

Advice: consider your new workforce strategy and look for the most valuable HR skills and

capabilities in dealing with the new workforce, and use this to guide your reorganization.

2. Implementing new Talent and Capability Management Solutions: The second

major driver behind new HR organizations is a need to implement talent and capability

management strategies. Consider one of our clients who is a large, well known consumer

packaged goods company. This particular company has a well established talent

management strategy which moves people across functional organizations (e.g. marketing,

sales, manufacturing) from product line to product line. These people rise through the

organization in these functional roles and eventually have the opportunity to become

general managers of consumer products.

This is a very traditional talent strategy, pioneered by Procter & Gamble and now used by

Unilever, Clorox, Kraft/Altria, and many other consumer goods companies.


2/4

But how does this type of organization work when the company enters a major economic

slowdown, an acquisition, or divestiture of an entire product category? It builds functional

skills which are supposedly transferrable into a new product. But in reality, what our

research has shown, is that many such CPG (consumer packaged goods) companies have

old, long-established techniques for marketing which may or may not fit into such a new

market.

Clorox, for example, creates entirely new marketing and product teams to enter new

markets. The highly successful Green Works product line from Clorox was incubated and

developed outside of the companys traditional marketing organization.

Bottom line: as we find in almost every industry, the magic to a newly combined talent

management organization is not to simply squash together all the organizational

development roles, but rather to stitch them together with a strong focus on the companysstrategic business needs. In our High Impact Talent Management research we find

organizations which succeed with integrated talent management create talent pools which

are treated in special ways based on their demographic, skills, and strategic role. Oil

companies, for example, must create special talent pools for exploration and production

engineers, because they provide such high value and are in such short supply.

3. Adoption and Integration of New HR and Learning 2.0 Technologies: The third

major change which is causing HR to change is the rapid adoption of new HR and Learning

2.0 (read social networking) technologies. It is now possible to purchase an HRMS system

which includes integrated functionality for goal alignment, performance management,

succession planning, talent pooling, career management, and more. And in the area of

enterprise learning, todays new learning management systems (LMS) now have social

networking, collaboration, messaging, and content management embedded.

In addition, as our latest High Impact Learning Organization research shows, more and

more of an organizations capability-building expertise now lies in its ability to create

internal collaboration and communities of practices and less relies on traditional

competency management and training.

Consider a large pharmaceutical company. We are working with three such companies right

now and each are looking for ways to reduce L&D costs by implementing integrated

technologies and organization structures to share knowledge, collaboration, tools, and

infrastructure across sales, research, manufacturing, and other large business functions.


3/4

The traditional HR and L&D organization which may have decentralized groups must be

changed to take advantage of these new integrated technologies.

Bottom line: new technologies can be transformational, but make sure you consider how

they will force and enable your HR and L&D organization to collaborate as well. If you want

to understand how these changes are occurring, read our new Social Software 2009

research or our just-published report The Essential Guide to Performance and Talent

Management Systems.

In 2008 and 2009 we expect many organizations to grapple with these challenges: what is

the new role for corporate training? What do we do with the HR generalists located in our

business units? How does the talent management team create strategies which can be

customized for critical roles? And what parts of HR should be globalized vs. decentralized?

While the traditional approach to outsourcing HR transactions continues to drive cost

reduction, I believe it is these higher level issues which are really going to drive HRs value

in the next 12-24 months. With the economy slowing and more than 30% of organizations

going through some type of restructure or leadership change, we must think about how we

will reorganize ourselves to provide cost reduction, integrated talent solutions, and enable

new technologies all at once.

(We have a variety of tools and assessments to help organizations work through these

issues please contact us if you would like to learn more.)

1. Bank of baroda2. Bank OF Maharashtra3. Canara Bank4. Central Bank Of India5. Corporation Bank6. De

na Bank

7. Indian Bank8. Indian Overseas Bank9. Oriental Bank10. Punjab & Sind Bank11. Punjab National Bank12. S B of Bikaner & Jaipur


4/4

13. State Bank of Hyderabad14. State Bank of India15. State Bank of Indore16. State Bank of Mysore17. State Bank ofPatiala18. State Bank of Travancore19. State Bank of Saurashtra20. Syndicate Bank Overview21. Allahabad Bank of India22. Andhra Bank of India23. The Bank of India24. UCO Bank25. U

nio

n Banko

f India

26. United Bank of India27. Vijaya Bank

hr restrurung

Documents