HR as a Vocation
Guiding the Reorganization of Human Resources
Starting Point:
The restructuring of the company required a complete transformation of the HR department. In its previous form, the HR department was purely an administrative center, whereas the new plan was to turn it into an internal consultancy, providing its clients with support and advice on all HR matters. The HR department’s administrative duties were also to expand to include strategic HR activities such as personnel and organizational development. The HR Director wanted to shape this transformation in collaboration with all the employees.
Procedure:
We led workshops and consultancy sessions in the HR department for 1 year. Our attitude: Only if the employees go into the reorganization phase without fear and aware of their own abilities will they be able to invest the necessary effort to ‘reinvent’ themselves and the department. We took the ‘Appreciative Inquiry’ approach. Employees and managers attended several workshops together, discovering the HR department’s strengths and what they had achieved so far. They got to know their own skills and took on board what changes would be required. They dissected the company vision and strategy along with the opportunities and challenges it would bring to the HR department. Developing a vision and strategy for the HR department was a creative process from which they also determined what the HR team would have to do and what they needed to implement this strategy. Within one year, the new structures and processes were in place and the necessary skills had been developed. Workshops highlighted the milestones that had already been reached, identified barriers to implementation and produced solutions to deal with those barriers.
Results:
The employees went into the process tentatively – they had never previously been involved in shaping their department or its strategy. This tentativeness quickly transformed into engagement in the process with every individual taking responsibility for the department’s future form. The HR department was remodeled and the HR Business Partner Model gradually introduced with changes to roles, tasks, structures and processes. The process was not always easy but overcoming these sticking points was also important for the team to be able to reach the next level of development. The team’s ‘customers’ within the company soon noticed the change – and were pleasantly surprised by the new attitude and the range of services now offered by their HR consultants.
Our Tasks:
We collaborated on this project for a year as change facilitators, coaches, expert consultants and trainers in the areas of ‘HR Business Partner Model’, ‘Internal Customer Focus’ and ‘HR as Internal Consultants.’