Balanced Scorecard Issue

The balanced scorecard is one of the most common business tools to balance the goals in the strategy as the organization can keep its growth in the long term view. The balanced scorecard was introduced to protect the value of the company for shareholders as the management does not set too short term goals. The balanced scorecard is extremely important for the HR Business Partnering as HR Team becomes responsible for more business areas than just the People part.

HR Balanced Scorecard

Generally, the balanced scorecard makes the goals visible and easily sorted and tries to add the new value to each of four main dimensions – Finance, Clients, Processes and People. When there is no Balanced Scorecard in place, the managers tend to prefer the Finance part as it brings huge bonuses and the shareholders are happy and the shareholders believe, everything is fine with their company.

The HR Business Partnering is about accepting the goals and challenges from other areas, than just the People part. The HR Team has to be partially responsible for the Finance part, which is about an excellent cost management of the personnel expenses in the whole organization, bringing new bonus schemes to place and other items. The client part is about good training offered to the internal customers as the managers feel comfortable and the employees are skilled enough for the new challenges and new product lines. The processes part is about the preparation of the company for the expansion and bringing significant cost savings from HR Operations.

The HR Business Partners are pushed by the balanced scorecard to understand the business of their internal client as they become responsible for many solutions and decisions, which are made on the side of the internal client. They have to know, what are the main drivers for the financial results as they can be the real partners in the discussions and their ideas can support the whole decision process.

The internal client expects HR Professionals to be co-responsible for 3 parts of the balanced scorecard and the internal clients expects that Human Resources will be the leader for the subordinates in the 4th part of the balanced scorecard – People. The HR Professionals have many tools they can introduce and they definitely should to be the real HR Business Partners.