The New Business Savvy HR Frontier

Xandra Feliza Galang, Global Vice President for HR Organization Development and Culture, Atlantic, Gulf & Pacific Company (AG&P)

From transactional to transformational, and now influential, the expectation from HR is exponentially increasing as the business environment continues to rapidly evolve. We have all seen this during the pandemic when HR was, willingly or unwillingly, put in the spotlight as transformational front liners in the areas of digitalization, employee wellbeing, hybrid workforce planning, customer experience, and re-organization.  

Three years later and with a seat now cemented in the boardroom, the next challenges that most HR leaders have now are:

“How might we play a role in employees’ search for authenticity, meaning, and purpose?”

“How might we increase our capacity to make a difference?”

“How might we become a stronger driver of business impact?”

From staff to managers, HR needs to be more engaged in operational affairs to provide direct impact in achieving business goals with abrupt pivots. For this to happen, a quantum leap is needed from influencing organizational culture to also influencing board members in making the right business decisions.

These are emerging roles that are not part of our traditional HR DNA but are now non-negotiable to many organizations.

Influencers of Business Leaders

The stigma that HR is merely an order taker is already lightyears behind us. And while we are still currently deep in our role as transformation partners, we should start transitioning to being modern-day influencers of board members. This task is easier said than done as managing top-level business leaders and owners imposes a lot of ambiguity and requires careful navigation in an agile anticipation of possible futures.

At the basic level, HR should instill in their minds the HR roles of a leader. Without people, we do not have a business. Leveraging on HR to do all those roles, no matter how much you align to the traditional army of HR headcount with a 1:100 FTE ratio, just won’t work anymore. We must make leaders perform the roles that they often forget about – enablers of team engagement, learning, and high performance. With the right processes and tools in place, HR should be able to direct and enable them to perform these essential roles alongside their functional expertise.

But more than that, the new HR should also be able to steer leaders to prepare for unforeseen challenges and execute effective solutions to address them. While this starts with knowing what is happening on the ground, it should not stop there. We should be able to gather the most trusted insights from the challenges that we see.  By validating, synthesizing, and analyzing information, we can proactively identify which ones have the most potential impact on the organization’s bottom line. Then, by creating a compelling business case, HR can lead the co-creation of business solutions with other leaders.

“Being an influential and business-savvy HR ensures that there is a fit-for-purpose alignment between the organizational goals and people strategies that you are executing.”

In this way, HR brings forth critical challenges and solutions that may not be within the purview of others. By offering a human-centered lens, we influence them to take tactical or strategic actions that cover a wider base of stakeholders.

Business Savvy Not Fluffy

HR is not merely presenters of business information; they are partners in business development too. We no longer just support strategies, but we become part of creating them and finding means to make them happen.

Acquiring business acumen takes a lot more than just research. It entails constant communication with your internal and external leaders to fully grasp how the business works and speak their language. It is important that HR not only knows the context of the business but also interprets it from the perspective of investors, customers, and employees.

Here’s a good case in point. As my organization prepares to operationalize business expansion, my team gathered our top leaders with the aim of re-articulating business models, ideating new revenue streams, setting business directions, and crystallizing operational goals. Amidst all these seemingly business activities, our HR team was at the center of it all from designing, facilitating, and probing -business concepts and challenging risks to ensure that the right strategies and decisions were made. While we were not technical experts, we made sure we understood our business enough to churn out crystal-clear deliverables that are ready for cascading to all employees.

Understanding the Importance

It is exciting to see how HR’s value-added roles will come into play and evolve soon. For now, being directly involved in the business side of things will help HR gain better traction in providing people with programs that will directly impact the revenue. Being an influential and business-savvy HR ensures that there is a fit-for-purpose alignment between the organizational goals and people strategies that you are executing. As an HR leader, this also allows you to make data-driven decisions that do not only drive employee performance but also business growth and profitability. Everything else comes after that. These also play a pivotal role in building high trust and confidence from your peers and leaders about discussions outside of the HR realm. No matter how great we are as HR practitioners, we are still running a business at the end of the day.

How and Where to Start?

The first step to being business savvy and influential is to build your people data from recruitment, learning, and talent management to engagement and even culture. Having this data and connecting the right dots is your first step to providing an aligned business and people narrative. Invest in training your team in data analytics and storytelling. These skills will help bridge their message to the leaders in a business-oriented way.

More importantly, expose your team members to critical business information that will help them in building the right strategies and action plans. Allow them to participate in some of the top-level meetings so they can have a better grasp of the organizational needs by hearing it straight from other leaders. In this way, they can start to think about the “why” and “what” before they jump to the “how”. We need to lead the organization in developing strategies that are logical and worth executing. This means clearly setting the options that the organization has and identifying executable ways to achieve them.

I can only imagine the value that any HR team adds to the table by practicing these things. In my opinion, it’s only a matter of time before we will not only be regarded as human resources but as business activators as well.

Customer Experience

Agile