The document discusses Ulrich's model of human resources (HR) management, which defines four key roles for HR: strategic partner, administrative expert, employee champion, and change agent. It then examines research on adopting Ulrich's model in practice, finding that less than 30% of organizations fully implemented the model, while 30% partially implemented it. Some organizations structure HR into shared services, centers of excellence, and strategic business partners instead of Ulrich's four roles. Successfully implementing business partnering requires strong relationships across HR functions and assessing whether HR has the needed skills.

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Ulrich’s model of HR

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Four key roles
• Strategic Partner – Aligning HR and business strategy: ‘organisational
diagnosis’
• Administrative Expert – Reengineering organisation processes:
‘shared services’
• Employee Champion – Listening and responding to employees:
‘providing resources to employees’
• Change Agent – Managing transformation and change: ‘ensuring
capacity for change’

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The Ulrich Model

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Strategic Partner
• Working closely with senior business leaders on strategy execution. In
particular designing HR systems and processes that address strategic
business issues: a big departure for HR from the responsive approach
adopted in the past
• Most commentators agree that today’s HR function needs to be much
more business focused
• In practice this means being more customer-focused; cost efficient;
innovative, and structured in such a way that it can quickly respond to
changing priorities

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Administrative Expert
• Practitioners operating as Administrative Experts can play a strategic
role; an example would be putting together a business case for
implementing a shared service, something which if not implemented
effectively can damage the employee relationship

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Employee Champion
• Employee Advocate or Employee Champion is a core HR role. HR has to represent employees,
protect their interests and make sure that strategic initiatives are well balanced
• HR runs regular Voice of Employee satisfaction surveys to identify gaps in the corporate culture
and HR and managerial practices
• HR ensures that employees have a fair chance to apply for new roles in the organisation
• HR runs training and development sessions to develop skills and competencies of employees
• HR leads initiatives to improve the experience of employees in the organisation
• HR manages the regular grievance and compliance procedure to ensure that employees enjoy fair
treatment from the management

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Change Agent
• The change agent is a second strategic role of Human Resources
• HR participates in change management teams and takes the responsibility to communicate changes internally and gain the trust of employees
• HR leads initiatives to prepare employees for change
• HR plans the internal communication and intervenes to plans to make them achievable and understandable by employees.
• HR plans training sessions for employees and helps them to gain new skills and competencies, which are required for a changed role
• HR updates job descriptions, consults changes with employees and helps them to transform their job habits
• HR continuously collects feedback from employees, transfers it to teams and requires project teams to introduce changes and adjustments, which are
positive for employees
• HR supports changes in the organisation and leads initiatives to make changes easier for employees.

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Research by CIPD
• Research into the changing HR function indicates that although
Ulrich’s model appears to be a popular structure adopted for the HR
function in the UK, in practice less than 30% of survey respondents
had introduced the model in full. A further 30% indicated that they
had partially introduced the Ulrich model

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Three-legged stool
• Research identified that a variation of Ulrich’s model the ‘three-
legged stool’ model has been adopted by several larger organisations
when re-structuring their HR function. Broadly these three functional
areas include:
• Shared services, Centres of excellence, Strategic business partners

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Shared Services
• A single, often relatively large, unit that handles all the routine
‘transactional ‘ services across the business
• E.g. Resourcing, payroll, absence monitoring and advice on the
simpler employee relations issues
• Shared services’ remit is to provide low-cost effective HR
administration

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Centres of excellence
• Usually small teams of HR experts with specialist knowledge of
leading- edge HR solutions
• The role of centres of excellence is to deliver competitive business
advantages through HR innovations in areas such as reward, learning,
engagement and talent management
• Some major multinationals have ‘centres of expertise’ focused purely
on developing the HR talent pipeline

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Strategic business partners
• Senior HR professionals working closely with business leaders
influencing and steering strategy and strategy implementation
• The role can vary enormously depending on organisational size and
business priorities
• Some activities may include – organisational and people capability,
longer term resource and talent management planning, intelligence
gathering of good people management practices internally and
externally

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In groups
• Do you think it works – why?
• Why would organisations embrace it?
• What organisations would it work best in? – think of sector, size of
organisation , institutional etc
• How does the environment influence the approach used – think of
culture, national/regional/global etc

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Does it work?
• For business partnering to work successfully there needs to be good
working relationships between HR practitioners in different functional
teams. If not, the reputation of the whole HR function will be in
jeopardy. As business partners work more closely with seniors they
are the ones that will have to deal with negative feedback about the
HR function overall

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Why are organisations embracing business
partnering?
• Cost efficiency – The introduction of shared services is seen as being
particularly important to achieve savings, these cannot be realised
without other roles operating effectively
• Accelerating competition – HR has become central to business
competitiveness. Organisations need HR functions that can deliver
skilled, creative, motivated, flexible and committed employees
• Rising expectations of HR – Organisations are beginning to expect
more from HR. Business leaders will ask how their own HR functions
need to change to make real differences to their businesses

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Implementing business partnering
• Ensure that there is a clear rationale for the proposed changes and
that it is a joint decision between the business and HR
• Assess and prepare the ground for change
• Ensure sufficient time to openly discuss partnering, what it means
and what adjustments are needed both within HR and across the
wider business
• Assess the skills needed to perform the business partner role

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The challenges
• The capabilities required by business partners are different to those
required in other HR roles. They need to develop different skill sets, such
as:
 Strategic thinker
 Consultancy skills
 Relationship management
 Expert networker
 Business and financial understanding
 Change Management
 Influencing and political awareness skills

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Finally - beware
• Some writers have commented how HR, with its increasing allegiance
to strategic business partnering, is taking its eye off employee needs.
It’s important that the need to engage employees, so they are willing
to give discretionary effort, is not overlooked!