From watch the comments made in Video 2.1: HRD in practice,
- I believe the primary purpose of HRD?
EL: Is to establish what the business's strategic plans is and, in particular, what drive the business and who makes the contribution promoting that business?
- How can HRD make a real difference?
EL: Well, in my own personal experience, nothing speaks louder than actually running a successful intervention. And I would be quite honest and say that the first time you run an intervention, you will be faced with lots of cynicism, lots of setbacks, lots of often, to be quite frank, negativity from other functions. But if your intervention is successful, then it will form its own PR and that will actually promote your intervention. And generally speaking, if you've put a lot of research and preparation into your intervention, you've actually managed to harness support from those participants, they will then go out and spread the message that actually HRD know what they're talking about. They're supporting us. They know how to actually provide the right skills, training for employees. It's making a bottom-line difference to the business. If you can make that bottom line difference to the business, then you've got them. And then you're literally motoring, and then you can literally put forward suggestions that might previously have been put on the back burner. It will depend on the organisation. Because in many organisations that I've worked with, there isn't necessarily a separate HRD function. So, if we take it from the perspective that there is a separate HRD function in an ideal world-- a lovely scenario, I might add-- then you would be first and foremost interrelating with the HR function, with your colleagues in human resources. You would then be interrelating with all the other business support functions, so that could be marketing, PR, anything that's involved in the business in terms of the functions that would go right across the organisational charts. So, it would mean that if you're in HRD, you are having to relate to people at the top of the organisation. So that could be the chairman, the board, downwards, if it's that type of company. And that would include the people that even come into clean on a Saturday morning. If you're in, say, for example, a public sector organisation, say like a council, it may be more defined as to how you actually interrelate with other functions. But it should still follow the same principles, that you actually, in HRD, talk to all people at all levels of the organisation.
- What would you say are the key interfaces for HRD, in terms of people and business areas?
JH: I think what's really key is to understand the strategy of an organisation. So in terms of partnering with people, I think it's great to understand how operations, finance, and marketing functions work, because they're kind of core parts of an organisation. So, the enabling functions of an organisation, to really understand that, I think will help build credibility for you.
MT: In a smaller organisation, it think the HRD has to stay very connected with the owner of that organisation, if it's a privately owned company, or at least with the directors of that organisation. Because they are the ones who know what the strategy is all about. And in that case, you can connect learning, development, and challenge strongly with that organisation's strategy. And in that case, you need to be even more agile. Because in a smaller organisation, the strategy might change even more often. And I think that's an important thing to think about.
TK: In terms of key partners, recruitment's usually a key partner because anybody we recruit, obviously, we never recruit in a finished article. Nobody's ever the finished article; they always need to be developed. So, when people are coming in through assessment centres or undergoing psychometric evaluation, getting that information off recruitment so we can hit the ground running in terms of, OK, you've talked to the director, which is quite a senior position. But as soon as you've joined, we're going to have these development interventions in place so that you can get up to speed as quickly as possible and fit the role profile we brought you in for. So, recruitments always very important. And we also spend a lot of time talking to line managers. And so, our line managers might typically have between 5 and 10 people in their team. And so, we only have to talk to about 20% of our entire employee population. And we can talk about everybody in that population's development needs. So, talking to line manager, getting their feedback in terms of actually on the ground-- what do they need? What kind of results are they seeing from the development programmes? Programmes And what would they like to see next?
JEREMY
HOWELL
ERICA LEVY
MARIANO TUFRO
TIM HAGGETT
