Here’s a great topic to be thinking about as we head into Labor Day: HR Transformation.
What is HR transformation, you ask? According to author, University of Michigan business professor, and all-around HR Guru Dave Ulrich, HR transformation is “how to transform HR practices so that they are aligned to customer needs and integrated around organization capabilities.” He even co-authored a book about it — HR Transformation: Building Human resources From the Outside In.
According to Ulrich, the overall model for HR Transformation is simple. You need to ask:
It’s a great topic to be thinking about, especially if you are planning for a big fall push and perhaps some changes in your HR department after Labor Day. And, who better to listen to about it than Dave Ulrich, one of the greatest HR thinkers of our generation?
This video is from 2009, but it does a good job explaining the basics of HR Transformation and what you can get out of it — if done successfully, of course.
But Ulrich has some words of caution, too, because just like you can’t really pick up a “best practice” from somewhere else (where perhaps the company is doing a number of different things that are their “best practices”), just plug it into your organization and make it work. As Dave says, “a best practice alone doesn’t work; you need a best system.”
So it also goes with HR Transformation.
“What sometimes happens with HR Transformation is that somebody takes one practice … and (will say) we’ve transformed HR,” he says. “And it’s not true. What we want to do in this book is give you the entire road map of what HR Transformation looks like.”
Here’s the video. It’s well worth taking five minutes to listen to, because as in most everything having to do with HR, Dave Ulrich has a lot of smart and insightful things to say.
