As per the Management guru – David Ulrich, the term “HR Business Partner” means that Human Resources (HR) needs to be responsible for the strategic roles and goals of the organization and it needs to implement the necessary plans to ensure that the goals of the business are achieved. In other words HR needs to take a more active part in the organization’s growth. The term business partner covers the entire range of HR responsibilities like administrative, strategic and consulting.

In the current company the HR function has not been integrated with the core business functions and the company was of global nature with the employees and the contract workers spread across the globe. Because of the spread of operations and diversity of the workforce the HR division is struggling to meet the business requirements. The isolated business divisions need to be brought together and closely coupled to have a single unified HR business processes framework.

With the changes in the global economic environment and the increased competition in the market, the company needs to transform the working of the HR division. The HR needs to take better control of not only its own processes but engage better in the organization’s overall processes and goals. The HR needs to align itself to the possible changes and keep learning newer skills and capabilities to address the business needs better. It needs to work as a cross-organizational team so that it takes on the strategic business partner role as against the current passive role it holds.

Issues with the current HR Model

• Not much emphasis on the cost effectiveness and the operational efficiency
• HR has become a high cost, high manpower division, focusing more on the administrative functioning than on the strategic initiatives.
• There is a huge dependency on the HR for operational issues, hence a solution on the lines of Manger Self Service and Employee Self Service portals would help in taking care of most of the enquiries, issues and automate the processes.
• The HR function needs to become a supportive, active entity with more of a business partner role