Topic 13 – How HR contributes towards business & financial objectives

@lizphil – First if you haven’t already done so read all the posts on here as they can sometimes be enlightening (and it saves me having to repeat anything too! 🙂 )

The main problem you have to avoid is just describing what the HR function does and concluding it does a good job. You have to fill the gap between these two elements. If you have good reliable secondary data obtained from the company then no you wouldn’t necessarily have to do primary research yourself.

However you would have to provide some objective evidence to support your findings. So you need to show a relationship between how the HR department functions and the business and finance objectives by using some key data. This might be a combination of the following: staff turnover figures, absenteeism rates, any relevant data that the company has collected regarding staff motivation/ training. Are you proposing to use the company you work in or some other company? They may be prepared to let you have some internal information of this kind. There may be confidentiality issues so you need to clear this first. (In fact with prior permission from OBU you may be allowed to submit the organisation as an anonymous company, however you would have to provide the raw data you have relied on – otherwise it could all be a work of fiction). So perhaps you need to think about how you can get some data to work from first.

It does not necessarily involve a lot of financial data but the trend in profit per employee (if you have staff numbers) could indicate some measure of how successful the HR function is.

You may be able to show how good the company is in terms of employees as stakeholders (profit sharing, equal opportunity, company benefits etc) but this of itself will not be enough as you have to introduce some critical thought and some original analysis of your own. One way of introducing analysis / critical thought into this is if you can benchmark the organisation against best practice. Try to get your hands on some HR journals or relevant articles (take a look at Google Scholar – many journals require a subscription and the articles can be expensive to download individually but the tip here is to put the author’s name and title of the article in another search and see if there is an item on the right – a pdf or html file that you can download FOC). By reading the abstracts you may find that you are able to pick up a few ideas and hints on which areas to explore further.

I found this for example on GS by using the search “measuring effectiveness of HR function”
https://www.e-rh.org/documents/ISO/measuring-hr-kpi-for-hr.pdf

(There were several articles go take a look as they may be able to give you more ideas than I can!) Don’t forget to keep links and names of articles as it will (a) save time from hunting for them again and (b) if used they will need to be referenced

If you cannot get your hands on good secondary data you would need to consider how you can fulfil the brief for T13. Probably primary data is the only alternative.

@chickcynthia – a T13 RAP is about building up a case that demonstrates the relationship between the organisation’s HR function and its key objectives.

As you are using predominantly primary data you should first be aware of the requirements (see Prof Phil Clarke’s article in the Info Pack). You need to ensure that any questionnaires or interviews are really focused on the company objectives and that questions asked are well structured. You must provide a copy of the questionnaire and interview questions in your Appendices and a summary of the raw data from any survey.

In Part 2 you should set out who you interviewed (job title and any particular experience /qualifications they have e.g Ms Amin, who has been the head of HR for 5 years and has a diploma / degree in Management studies). When you cite any interviewee comments put their name and year after it e.g. (Amin, 2015) in the text and list this in the Ref list together with her full name, position and date of interview(s).

With questionnaires you need to understand the fundamentals of conducting a good survey and set out all the details in part 2 -how many people were surveyed, how they were selected, how many questionnaires were distributed etc. . Do NOT make up the data -it is so obvious when students fiddle the figures.

More objective evidence is usually better than primary data – so actual company data is preferred, so I suggest you try to include as much of this as possible and not overly rely on a questionnaire Your conclusions need to demonstrate a strong link to the evidence. If any questionnaire is poor and you have used this a lot then your chances of passing the Evaluation, Analysis & Conclusions will be slim. For this reason I advise students not to do questionnaires and surveys unless they spend a lot of time in perfecting the questions and ensuring they are clearly linked and structured to the project title… otherwise markers will tear the whole thing to shreds!

@tatie – no you do not need a comparator for T13 but you do need access to good inside information. You will have to start with establishing the company’s objectives. You then have to have some good information about HR policies, methods and procedures. These are likely to relate to how it recruits, trains, motivates and retains the best staff it can.

Staff turnover figures, possibly by department would be helpful. Financial information relating to revenue / profit per employee will be some of the objective measures required. Look through here to see if you can find models mentioned in a post. You can possibly use the balanced scorecard.

Overall though you need a good structure to your report. Lots of RAPs fail because they are poorly structured and throw lots of theory at the reader and follow this with insubstantial evidence relating to their company (vague statements, sweeping comments unsupported by evidence) presented in almost a random way. The evaluation and analysis needs to be strong with valid facts, obvious links to the company’s objectives set out so that the whole thing is coherent, logical and makes proper sense as a whole.

Unless you work in the organisation and they will let you have access to company handbooks and policies and other inside information you are unlikely to be able to do this topic successfully (as I explained on page 1 of this forum to Alfred).