HR professionals need to act as innovators, communicators, enablers and coordinators to truly add business value, explains Dr Jeroen Meijerink
‘Human resource professionals make a difference by creating added value for employees, line managers and the business.’ This idea, or mantra, is best reflected in numerous frameworks that describe the roles that HR professionals should adopt to meet business needs.
At the same time, empirical evidence for the value-creating capacity of these roles is not encouraging. Several academic studies have found that HR professionals’ adoption of the employee champion, administrative expert or strategic partner roles are, at best, weakly related to their effective functioning (see also: ‘Evidence from line managers and trade union representatives’ in The International Journal of Human Resource Management). These findings do not necessarily disqualify existing typologies of HR roles. However, in my view, we need a set of meta-roles that are important for HR professionals to fulfil – irrespective of their function, level or stakeholder group served – to secure high-level value creation.
In developing these meta-roles, HR management can learn a lot from its marketing counterparts. In fact, service marketing literature has spent decades of research on explaining service value – ie the benefits versus costs of services. HR practices can themselves be seen as an internal service that may provide benefits to employees (such as competence or career development), line managers (such as handling grievance issues) or the business at large (attracting and retaining scarce talent, for example).
Marketing researchers have disputed that the value of a service is only created ‘in use’. This value-in-use notion holds that service value depends on whether and how its recipient applies a service. The same likely applies for HR services. As an example, training and development practices may provide training participants with new knowledge and skills, but also help build new relationships among training participants. Training participants need additional resources – such as prior knowledge and skills, discretion granted by a manager to utilise new skills, or time of other participants to meet once the training sessions have ended – to fully reap the benefits of a provided HRM service. Accordingly, the recipients of HRM services (ie the employee or line manager) create value by how well they integrate provided HRM services with complementary resources. In support of this claim, a recent study showed that employees’ HRM competences – as complementary resources that allow them to co-produce HRM practices and consume them effectively – are positively related to their perceptions of HRM services’ value.
If employees and line managers are the creators of HR value, what roles does this leave for HR professionals in value creation processes? From a marketing perspective, one can distinguish four meta-roles that, once adopted by HR, support the creation of business value:
The innovatorrole involves the development of value propositions; new HR practices that have the potential to reduce costs (eg time, money or effort) or provide additional benefits for HR stakeholders. ‘Listening’ to employees’ or line managers’ wishes does not necessarily work, particularly when they cannot articulate them. Instead, innovators can better apply the so-called value proposition canvas for identifying:
the primary jobs/activities of their stakeholders;
how to reduce the pains (ie time, effort or frustration) they experience when performing their jobs; and/or
how to increase the gains (ie benefits) that help them to better perform their jobs.
The communicatorrole ensures that employees and managers actually make use of HR services. Therefore, this role does not just involve the internal branding of a new HR service; given that value is created ‘in use’, it is important that the communicator shares how employees and managers can use the provided service to best realise its intended benefits.
The enablerrole is adopted to support employees/managers in creating value-in-use out of provided HRM services. In other words, the enabler engages in value co-creation by joining and aiding the user of the service to effectively utilise it. Here, one can think of HR helpdesks that help employees use online self-services, or HR analysts that guide a manager in interpreting people metrics.
The coordinator role is about aligning the activities of various stakeholders in HRM value creation processes. To secure value-in-use, recipients of HRM services integrate complementary resources that they possess themselves or receive from others. In an HRM environment, these relevant ‘others’ can be manifold, such as supervisors, co-workers, HR shared service centres, centres of expertise and outsourcing vendors. To make value co-creation possible, the coordinator seeks to align the interests of these various constituents and, if necessary, enables them to provide complementary resources for securing high-level value-in-use creation by employees.
Although all contribute to the same goal, these four roles do not necessarily need to be enacted by one individual or department. Instead, it is likely that the innovator role rests with corporate HR or a centre of expertise, whereas the enabler and coordinator roles could be adopted by a shared service centre or local HR business partner.
Irrespective of who adopts which role, the development of new HR services, HR roles or HR activities (such as HR analytics, talent management and the new world of work) will not create value unless HR professionals acknowledge that their primary customers create the value out of HR activities. Therefore, it is crucial that HR professionals gear their activities towards guaranteeing an effective use of their services by employees and line managers through enacting the innovator, communicator, enabler and coordinator roles
Dr Jeroen Meijerink is an assistant professor of HRM at the University of Twente in the Netherlands