Each HR Activity should have a limit based on the common sense. The training (especially soft skills or managerial training) is one of the activities, which can hardly affect the performance of the organization.

The managerial soft skills training have two main goals. The first goal is to inspire the managers in the job with the employees and the second goal is about networking among managers. When the managers know each other informally, they can cooperate closely and across the whole organization.

The soft skills trainings have to be limited to the reasonable amount during the year. The managers have to focus also on practicing the skills they learned. The soft skills training are usually extremely theoretical and they need to leave managers to practice on their own. When they receive too much management trainings, they lose the chance to practice the skills and the training investment is lost.

The managerial trainings have to be carefully distributed among the managerial population. The manager can inspire each other on a daily basis. It is not good to send all managers to the same training, HR should organize the opportunity to exchange best practices on the informal basis.

The Human Resources needs to speak about the HR Story in the organization. HR Department has many HR Processes, HR Policies, HR Programs for specific groups of employees, but the HR Story tells why they exist and how they are connected with the business values, business strategy and the corporate culture.

The HR Story returns to the top vision of the company and aligns the results of Human Resources with the corporate values nicely. The results should be always aligned with the definite goal of the organization as the managers and employees see the effort of HR employees as value added to the whole organization.

The HR Story is extremely important for the introduction of new processes and initiatives as the HR Management has to show a direct connection with the values, culture and other HR processes. The flow of information and employees in the organization has to be visible and logical. The HR Story presents what exists and why. The new HR initiative is a new piece in the HR Puzzle.

The preparation of the HR Story is not easy, but it is a presentation, which should appear in a compressed form in any other HR Presentation as it keeps the story logical and it makes a “flashback” for employees to remember the whole concept of Human Resources.

Many companies use the assessment centers during the recruitment process. They want to hire the right person and they want to demonstrate the real life situations to select the job candidate with the best behavior. They usually fail. The assessment center does not show it, usually.

The assessment center should significantly increase the chance to select the right person and to minimize the costs of hiring as the orientation of the new employee can be quick and the desired performance level is reached quickly. How many assessment centers have you seen? The people know the rules of the assessment game. They can play the game for one day.

The assessment center is seen to be fair to all candidates as the conditions are the same. This is not usually true as the people always have their preferences and they see, what they want to see. There is always “hallo effect”. The external consultants can try to be objective and they can evaluate all criteria fairly, but the managers observing the candidates in the assessment center can prefer one candidate easily.

Many managers run the assessment centers as their excuse. They want to have some “expert” reason to hire the new employee. They know, whom they want to hire, they just need someone else to tell them “This person is the right one for the job.”
Running assessment centers just for this reason is extremely expensive option.

The role of the HR Business Partner is not easy. The HR Business Partner has to develop the relationship with two different partners – The partnering with the internal client on one side and the partnering with the HR Centers of Excellence and HR Back Office. Unluckily, the partners are different and the relationship can be broken in each moment.

The HR Business Partner has to balance the concerns of both partners of him. The HR Business Partner represents the interests of Human Resources at the internal client and he represents the requests of the internal client in HR Department. Sometimes, it is difficult to find a compromise and to reach common agreement without breaking the relationships.

The role of the HR Business Partner is to find a compromise by taking the evidence and arguments on both sides. Sometimes, the HR Business Partner has to convince the HR Employees about the proposal from the internal client being right. Sometimes, the internal client has to accept the wish of Human Resources. The HR Business Partner has to believe the selected solution is the right.

That is the main role of the HR Business Partner in the HR Business Partnering concept.

Many HR Directors sit in their chair and they are dreaming about better HR Function, more recognized HR employees and being more successful. They are wishing to introduce HR Business Partnering concept, as they believe, it is the main issue.

The HR Business Partnering does not have to be formal. it can be informal easily. The HR Employees does not have to be in the job position of the HR Business Partner, they can be Recruitment Specialist and they can add value to their internal clients.

The HR Employees can always act as a partner, when they understand the needs of the internal client and they are able to provide the client with a useful advice. The goal of each HR Director should HR employees, who understand the needs of their internal client.

The HR Business Partnering model is not about the formal organization of the HR Organizational Structure and HR Jobs. It is more about the approach of HR Employees to their job.

The HR Director has to lead the manager to acquire the knowledge of their internal clients and to advice them on a daily basis. The valuable advice is always welcome.

When your employees do a good job, you have to reward them. At least, you have to say “Thank You”. It is a good managerial rule, but we break it every single business day.

The employees do like to for the company and they usually like their manager as the manager provides them with the security and feedback. Sometimes, the manager asks for more – to deliver something quickly, to prepare the presentation over the night.

The manager cannot be just focused on the delivery of the results, but he has to be focused also on the people part of the delivery. The employees will do a lot, when they feel, they are recognized and rewarded. When they miss “Thank You” part, they will be motivated by the fear of losing their job.

The manager should always stand in the front of the team and he should recognized the employees, who contributed most to the common success. The manager has to take all fails as personal ones, all the successes as team ones.

It is almost end of the year and new goals should be set for the year 2010. As the economy should recover, the goals should be optimistic and heading us again to the nice future.

The Free HR Guide is an activity for a free time and it has to be taken so, but I should give goals myself as I can do a final evaluation after one year. Ok, it is not exactly one year, but 13 months.

The Goals have to be smart (specific, measurable, achievable, realistic and timely). That’s the theory. I will try to follow this recommendation and here is my set of goals for the Free HR Guide:

1. The average number of unique visitor will reach 1 800 visitors/day.
2. The average number of pageviews per visitor will reach 2,45.

Why these numbers? As the goals should be realistic and there is a potential for the growth. And it can motivate me to reach such numbers.

The HR Departments in organization have a different qualities and their value added to the whole organization differs dramatically. The HR Team can easily focus on the internal processes and the internal excellence and they can completely forget to add value to their internal clients. In such a case, this HR is completely useless for its internal clients and the satisfaction level decreases heavily.

The useless Human Resources is focused on the activities, which are defined as nice-to-have and they forget about the managers saying we-need-this. The HR Management has to find always a good balance between the internal HR development and the development for the internal customers. Both parts are extremely important for the general success of the HR Function.

As the Human Resources is not useless for its internal clients and customers, the HR Business Partnering model should be introduced. As the HR Business Partner co-operates with the internal client and shares the vision and goals, he or she inspires the rest of the HR Team to follow the strategy defined by the internal clients.

When the internal clients see the value added by Human Resources to their departments, they start to value the whole effort of HR and they would never say “Our HR is useless.”

The young and fresh university graduates entering Human Resources are always focused on the strategic topics. It is nice. But for Human Resources, the experience is extremely important as just the experience gives certainty in the proposals made to the leaders and managers.

The young fresh university graduates should not think about their role in the strategic HR management as they have to learn the basics of the function. They should do the real paperwork for some time as they can understand that the papers are important – sometimes. Sometimes, the papers are not important, they can be really strategic.

The career has to be build. The career steps are defined and the people have to grow pretty slowly. Building the experience and certainty need time and the people have to be patient.

Do not promise a quick career path in Human Resources or you can be in real troubles quickly. When the HR Professionals are not experienced enough, they make stupid mistakes and they cannot be the real HR Business Partners. They are not respected and their advices are not considered.

The HR Projects should be the result of the approved HR Strategy. The HR Strategy should not be build around the projects, but the projects should make the HR Strategy the reality. The HR team has to be aware, that the HR Project Plan can be changes by the introduction of the new HR Strategy.

The HR Projects should support the HR Strategy. In reality, the HR Projects are not connected with the HR or business strategy and the improvements are not significant for the organization or Human Resources.

The HR Projects are usually painful as the HR Information System is not unified and not consistently used for all HR Processes. The HR Projects are more about nice-to-have and they are not focused on building a standardized HR Data Warehouse providing the data for all the HR Processes.

Take look into your own daily practice. How many data do you have in your HR system and how many data do you hold in many Microsoft Excel sheets and files? The MS Excel is a great program to calculate the business case, but it should not act as the database. Generally, it acts as the database in many organization as it is simple and useful in the beginning. Just later, it brings a lot of mistakes and a lot of misunderstandings.

Each HR Project has to be focused on bringing the unified approach to Human Resources and to make the data available to all HR employees. The perfect HR Information System connects people better way than sending emails all around. This is also a goal of the excellent HR Strategy.