Pain of HR Business Partner

September 9th, 2007 | HR Role

HRM is usually organized as as a typical service organization. It has some Front Office, Back Office and Experts. Front Office deals with internal and external clients, Back Office processes the requests from Front Office and clients and Experts - develop new procedures and processes based on the requests of clients and from monitoring the market for best practices. In Front Office HR Business Partners are the most common position.

HR Business Partner

The Front Office part of Human Resources is usually the weakest part of the whole function. The employees, HR Business Partners, are under a constant pressure and they have to be really clever.

The main competencies and skills of the HR Business Partner are:

a deep knowledge of the internal client
a deep knowledge of the processes and procedures conducted at the internal client
a deep knowledge of HR procedures and policies
a knowledge of employees working at the internal client
a knowledge of the competition and external job market

The main role of the HR Business Partner is to provide the managers with a help how to work with HR policies and procedures. And - to help managers to work with their staff - to manage, to lead and to develop them to be more successful in the future.

But many times, the organization hire young employees to the positions of HR Business Partners, who cannot serve the client fully. They just serve the clients as “paper-handling” employees. They are not able to discuss with the manager the issues as they have no previous experience and HR Back Office and HR Experts are hugely overloaded as they have to solve the “issues” arisen by the HR Business Partners.

When the organization plans to hire a new HR Business Partner, it is better to look inside the organization to find a suitable person in Back Office or the Expert. Because the knowledge of procedures and the internal client is essential for the success in the position of the HR Business Partner.

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