Why Are We Still Talking About This? Exploring (Again) The Death of the HRBP
Natal Dank, PXO Culture
This is a picture of me 44 years ago, aged four, and I feel that it’s reasonable to claim that we have been discussing that the HR business partner needs to be strategic for roughly the same amount of time. But we haven’t solved it, and I think it’s because we’re having the wrong conversation. First of all, we linked it to the Ulrich model. Oh, it’s got to be structurally aligned. Then we said, oh, there’s too much BAU. They’re overwhelmed. And now we’re saying AI will save it all because they’ll get rid of the BAU. But we’re not going to naturally become strategic in these roles. And because the world of work has fundamentally changed and we now need to consider a new skill set, a new mindset, a new way of delivering value through the organization. And it’s not just HR that’s saying this, senior leaders are recognizing that there is fundamentally new expectations placed in HR from digitalization to transformation to just the increased complexity in our marketplace.
As a result, we’re seeing these new operating models emerge in our profession. And a lot of it is based on this idea of working much more as a strategic collective, solving business challenges together rather than these individual remits. So where does the HR business partner come into this? Well, we need to start shifting from this service provider over to a business strategist able to diagnose problems and start to orchestrate a series of actions to deliver value. How is your question you are asking, and we can actually pull on so many principles that already exist across the business. And a key part of this is actually starting to think of the employee experience as a product. So yes, made up of different component parts, onboarding, career development, reward, but it’s delivered out as a product across the organization. And the key to seeing the employee experience as a product is that products deliver value by solving problems, solving shared problems.
Like this group of people, they all want to be able to see some way in the dark where they’re walking their dog or they’re running. And if our product can solve people’s problems in the workforce, we’ll start to be able to actually articulate and measure the value that we’re delivering through the organization. And this means that HR becomes so much more than just the service because we’re partnering with the business solving the biggest challenges that the organization face. So where does the HR business partner come into this? Well, enter the account manager of the employee experience product. This is where I now place the HR business partner. It’s a really different role and skill set to what we’ve sort of seen the role do in the past. It’s intimately linked to this idea of managing the employee experience as a product. So we have the product here, and this is mainly designed, evolved, and steered by what we often call operations centers of excellence, but much more of a collective strategic team solving problems together.
And so the account manager sells the product into the business, just like a commercial product. We make sure it realizes value. We make sure it’s solving the right things. We track, we measure, we also advise where to test first, where to experiment. But crucially, like a commercial account manager, we help the team know what to solve next. So we are prioritizing, we’re helping manage that portfolio of work. We have to be a commercial voice and really understand the business to do this. And this brings out two new, I think, skill sets that maybe the business partner hasn’t had up until now. The ability to diagnose problems and stay in the problem, not the solution, and knowledge of the product. So what is the product doing? What’s getting developed next? What’s going to be sold in next? This is really different, I think, to the traditional career ladder of the HR business partner, from advisor through to partnering.
This is a commercial skill set. So to leave it, I’d like you to think about the T-shape. How do we embrace this in a more dynamic way? The T-shape is all about having one or a few deep specialisms, that’s the vertical. And then the horizontal are your general capabilities. You’re not the expert, but they’re quite important to be successful in a role. And so the new strategic business partner looks so much more like this, a deep expert in things like strategy and talent management, a good capability in things like data analytics and AI. So come and join me. Let’s finally put this debate to bed and let’s make HR business partners the account manager of employee experience product.
Watch the video of Natal delivering her session over on Vimeo >>>>> DisruptHR Glasgow 6.0 – June 19 2025 on Vimeo
