Leveraging the unique role of HR to excel as an HPO

Citation

de Waal, A. (2013), "Leveraging the unique role of HR to excel as an HPO", Strategic HR Review, Vol. 12 No. 2. https://doi.org/10.1108/shr.2013.37212baa.007

Leveraging the unique role of HR to excel as an HPO

Article Type: HR at work From: Strategic HR Review, Volume 12, Issue 2

Short case studies and research papers that demonstrate best practice in HR

André de WaalAcademic Director at the HPO Center

As organizations try to escape from the after effects of the Great Recession and the continuous financial upheavals in Europe, books and articles about how to transform a company into a “high performance organization,” or HPO, have been all the rage. More and more managers have begun turning to HPO literature to help them overcome their problems – and hopefully build organizations that truly excel.

Unfortunately, most HPO books and articles offer only recipes for success without providing any scientific rigor or genuine proof that these recipes will actually work.

Delving further in the HPO

To fill the vacuum of a scientifically validated HPO framework, beginning in 2003 I embarked on a descriptive review of 290 academic and practitioner publications focused on the topic of organizational high performance. My review yielded several insights on how to attain this lofty goal, including some surprising knockdowns of classic management rules.

As well, a clear definition emerged:

A High Performance Organization is an organization that achieves financial and non-financial results that are exceedingly better than those of its peer group over a period of time of five years or more, by focusing in a disciplined way on that which really matters to the organization.

Armed with this new information, I took the research a step further. In the empirical part of the HPO research, data was collected though questionnaires and interviews from organizations in many profit, non-profit and government sectors around the world and in high, average and low performing organizations. More than 3,200 respondents were asked to indicate how proficient their organizations had been at exhibiting these HPO characteristics, and how they felt they performed against their competitors. Because the organizations that participated in the study were not selected in advance it was possible to generalize the outcomes, making them valid for different organizations, in different countries, and in different contexts.

Five factors of high performance

During the statistical analysis, I isolated five HPO “factors,” characteristics that possessed a significant correlation with high organizational performance. The conclusion was evident: organizations paying more attention to HPO factors achieve better results than their peers, a conclusion that has since held up for every industry, sector and country in the world.

Here are the five factors of high performance:

1. 1.

   Management quality. Managers on all levels of the organization maintain trust relationships with employees by valuing their loyalty, maintaining individual relationships, and treating people fairly. They are decisive, action-focused decision-makers.

2. 2.

   Openness and action orientation. Management values the opinion of employees by frequently having dialogues with them and involving them in business and organizational processes. HPO management allows experiments and risk taking, and sees mistakes as an opportunity to learn.

3. 3.

   Long-term orientation. Long-term gain is far more important than short-term profit. An HPO continuously strives to enhance customer value creation by learning what customers want and maintains good long-term relationships with all stakeholders by networking broadly, taking an interest in and giving back to society, and creating mutually beneficial opportunities.

4. 4.

   Continuous improvement and renewal. The process of continuous improvement starts with an HPO adopting a unique strategy that will set the company apart. It continuously simplifies, improves and aligns all its processes to respond to events efficiently and effectively. The organization also measures and reports everything, so it is able to monitor goal fulfillment and confront the brutal facts.

5. 5.

   Employee quality. An HPO makes sure it assembles a diverse and complementary workforce and recruits people with maximum flexibility to help detect problems in business processes and to incite creativity in solving them. An HPO continuously works on the development of its workforce to train staff letting them learn from others through partnerships, inspiring them to improve their skills so they can accomplish extraordinary results, and holding them responsible for their performances.

The role of HR in creating the HPO

As part of the transition to being a HPO, everybody in the company has to play a part, and HR is no exception. To do this, HR should continue to focus on the traditional activities of personnel management, like guarding the evaluation and reward processes, recruiting, and personnel administration. But additionally, HR needs to move to a more strategic role in which it advises management on strategic human resource issues in such a way that these support the improvement of the five HPO factors.

The insight for change potential in the organization does not always appear at the same time on all organizational levels. Often there are individual organizational units where the idea of HPO comes up earlier and more powerful and where they start experimenting with it, long before the other units or top management becomes aware of this. Human resources, as one of the functions which moves around the complete organization thus having a unique advantage and insight into a company’s HPO transition, can make sure it is involved in those experiments and that it then conveys the results to other organizational units.

In this way HR not only acts as the messenger of the HPO thinking, it can also make sure the successes of the HPO transition in those units are visible to others to act as an example and to entice them to also start experimenting with HPO. After all, success breeds success, and HR can play the important role of being the booster of HPO all over the organization.

The HPO factors in practice

For HPO status to be solidly attained, the five factors outlined here must be put into rigorous practice. Without doing so, organizations cannot become or remain truly high performing. HR needs to leverage its unique position within organizations to bolster and support the HPO process. This is what HR can contribute to each of the five HPO factors:

1. 1.

   Management quality. HR should organize formal training, coaching-on-the-job and training-on-the-job that emphasizes specifically the improvement of the HPO characteristics “being inspiring,” “being a role model for employees,” and “coaching.”

2. 2.

   Employee quality. HRM should make sure that the organization only hires new employees that fit the profile of being flexible and resilient, and are an addition to the team.

3. 3.

   Continuous improvement and renewal. HR should focus managers on developing and strengthening the core competencies of themselves and their employees, and in addition should streamline the HRM processes throughout the organization.

4. 4.

   Openness and action orientation. HR should stress with managers the importance of and train them in involving employees, and in addition – because HR comes everywhere in the organization – should facilitate the knowledge sharing process in the company.

5. 5.

   Long-term orientation. HR should guarantee a good working environment, and stress to managers that they should make themselves “obsolete” by developing the quality of their employees.

About the author

André de Waal MSC MBA PhD is the author of the bestseller What Makes a High Performance Organization, Five Validated Factors of Competitive Advantage that Apply Worldwide from Global Professional Publishing. He is also Academic Director of the HPO Center, The Netherlands, and Associate Professor HPO of the Maastricht School of Management, The Netherlands. André de Waal can be contacted at: www.whatmakesahighperformanceorganization.com