Chief human resources officer

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A chief human resources officer (CHRO) or chief people officer (CPO) is a corporate officer who oversees all aspects of human resource management and industrial relations policies, practices and operations for an organization. Similar job titles include: chief people officer, chief personnel officer, executive vice president of human resources and senior vice president of human resources. [1] [2] Roles and responsibilities of a typical CHRO can be categorized as follows: workforce strategist, organizational and performance conductor, HR service delivery owner, compliance and governance regulator, and coach and adviser to the senior leadership team and the board of directors. CHROs may also be involved in board member selection and orientation, executive compensation, and succession planning. [3] [4] In addition, functions such as communications, facilities, public relations and related areas may fall within the scope of the CHRO role. Increasingly, CHROs report directly to chief executive officers and are members of the most senior-level committees of a company (e.g., executive committee or office of the CEO). [5]

Contents

Evolution of the profession

The role of the CHRO has evolved rapidly to meet the human capital needs of organizations operating across multiple regulatory and labor environments. Whereas CHROs once focused on organizations human resources in just one or two countries, today many oversee complex networks of employees on more than one continent and implement workforce development strategies on a global scale. CHROs are especially important now in helping companies navigate the workforce issues associated with expanding into emerging markets, and in developing labor policies to suit different regions of the world while preserving a company's core culture.

The strategic role of the CHRO has also expanded as workforces are increasingly composed of knowledge workers, and companies require better systems to compete for scarce high-skilled workers. Rather than focusing exclusively on human resource issues and service delivery, CHROs must concentrate on creating strong talent pipelines to both enhance organizational decision-making and secure future growth. [6] These changes in the business landscape have required the CHRO to heighten the focus on talent, capabilities and company culture.

Responsibilities

According to an annual survey conducted by the largest industry group for CHROs, the HR Policy Association in the United States, top CHRO concerns over the years fall roughly into three broad categories: talent, capabilities, and culture. [7]

Talent

Talent management includes building the quality and depth of talent, including a focus on succession and leadership/employee development. In a separate survey of over 200 U.S. and European CHROs, University of South Carolina professor Patrick Wright [8] found that nearly all participants cited 'talent' as the top priority on their CEO's agenda for HR. [9] [10]

Capabilities

Managing corporate capabilities includes dealing with rapid changes in technology, globalization, and the increasingly complex external context of government regulations and public policy (impacting union and employee relations, executive compensation, health care, retirement programs, health and safety, etc.).

The key capabilities required are expected to vary by company based on business strategy and the competitive global environment. Adapting to new technologies and sources of information and communications are essential to success for all companies. Other capabilities the HR function must help the company develop include: managing the external context, managing a multi-generational workforce, adapting to change, and operating effectively in different cultures and business structures.

Culture

Cultural issues include organizational change, agility, social networking, ethics and values, innovation, customer focus, employee engagement, diversity and inclusiveness, and multiculturalism. [11]

The human resources function has a leadership role in helping shape the culture of the company. Ensuring that the values of the company are communicated and understood at all levels, providing clarity as to the expected behavior of all employees and the development of a high performance culture are important aspects of the CHRO role. When an employee's behavior is inconsistent with the values of the company, the human resources function is responsible for ensuring that such situations are dealt with fairly. The HR function also helps the organization establish and maintain high levels of employee engagement and commitment.

Increasingly, companies are relying on external partners, joint-ventures, as well as merged and acquired companies as sources of innovation, capabilities and growth. Establishing a culture that is supportive of such external partnerships is an area where the HR function plays an important role. [12]

Summarizing the findings of a recent study of HR leaders, Randy MacDonald, former CHRO for IBM, indicated that the three key workforce gaps CHROs cite as the biggest opportunities for HR are:

Path to becoming a CHRO

The CHRO is the top HR position, but those who attain this role arrive there by working in a variety of functions both within the HR function and other functional and leadership roles both inside their company and across industries and employers. [14] In a 2011 survey of top HR leaders, roughly two-thirds of CHROs indicated they worked outside HR at some time in their career. There is also significant movement between companies with only 36% of US CHROs gaining their position through internal promotion. [15] In terms of HR experience, one survey indicated that the most common area of functional experience for CHROs is talent management; the next most common experience is compensation and benefits, followed by organizational culture. Current CHROs have had broader functional experience in HR than their predecessors and are less likely to have had experience in labor relations than past CHROs.

Job description

Two recently published books about the CHRO profession, The Talent Masters: Why Smart Leaders Put People Before Numbers, by Bill Conaty and Ram Charan; [16] and The Chief Human Resource Officer, Defining the Role of Human Resource Leaders by Pat Wright, offer insights into the profession from its leading practitioners. [17]

The perennial top priority for CHROs is talent management. In The Chief Human Resource Officer, Defining the Role of Human Resource Leaders, Eva Sage-Gavin, former CHRO for the Gap emphasizes this point saying, "... at the end of the day, you and your team are the experts at talent management and must be able to understand and identify good versus great talent… Identifying critical positions, the great attributes needed to fill them, and prioritizing recruiting strategies accordingly was the key to success, whether I was working with engineers, apparel designers, or international operations management." [18] Kevin Cox, CHRO for American Express, argues that "Great CHROs (and great CEOs) understand that talent needs to be developed in thoughtful, but not incremental, ways. Getting the balance right between ‘stretch’ and ‘in over her head’ isn't easy, but it is vital to the success of a world-class talent strategy." [19]

The CHRO helps the company build sustainable competitive advantage through the selection and development of top talent that possess capabilities that help differentiate the company from its competitors. Conaty and Charan emphasize this point in Talent Masters by noting that “Only one competency lasts. It is the ability to create a steady, self-renewing stream of leaders. Money is just a commodity. Talent supplies the edge. We can’t put it any better than Ron Nersesian, the head of Agilent Technologies’ Electronic Measurement Group: ‘Developing people’s talent is the whole of the company at the end of the day. Our products all are time- perishable. The only thing that stays is the institutional learning and the development of the skills and the capabilities that we have in our people.’” [20]

Other leading CHROs emphasise additional aspects of HR leadership, such as delivering results with a global team – a major challenge identified by Hugh Mitchell, [21] – and developing and communicating an employee value proposition that will differentiate the company in its efforts to attract and retain the caliber of talent needed to achieve its business objectives, as emphasized by Michael Davis, former CHRO for General Mills. [22]

Related Research Articles

Human resources (HR) is the set of people who make up the workforce of an organization, business sector, industry, or economy. A narrower concept is human capital, the knowledge and skills which the individuals command. Similar terms include manpower, labor, or personnel.

Chief information officer (CIO), chief digital information officer (CDIO) or information technology (IT) director, is a job title commonly given to the most senior executive in an enterprise who works with information technology and computer systems, in order to support enterprise goals.

Succession planning is a process and strategy for replacement planning or passing on leadership roles. It is used to identify and develop new, potential leaders who can move into leadership roles when they become vacant. Succession planning in dictatorships, monarchies, politics, and international relations is used to ensure continuity and prevention of power struggle. Within monarchies succession is settled by the order of succession. In business, succession planning entails developing internal people with managing or leadership potential to fill key hierarchical positions in the company. It is a process of identifying critical roles in a company and the core skills associated with those roles, and then identifying possible internal candidates to assume those roles when they become vacant. Succession planning also applies to small and family businesses where it is the process used to transition the ownership and management of a business to the next generation.

Human resource management is the strategic and coherent approach to the effective and efficient management of people in a company or organization such that they help their business gain a competitive advantage. It is designed to maximize employee performance in service of an employer's strategic objectives. Human resource management is primarily concerned with the management of people within organizations, focusing on policies and systems. HR departments are responsible for overseeing employee-benefits design, employee recruitment, training and development, performance appraisal, and reward management, such as managing pay and employee benefits systems. HR also concerns itself with organizational change and industrial relations, or the balancing of organizational practices with requirements arising from collective bargaining and governmental laws.

Human resource policies are continuing guidelines on the approach of which an organization intends to adopt in managing its people. They represent specific guidelines to HR managers on various matters concerning employment and state the intent of the organization on different aspects of Human Resource management such as recruitment, promotion, compensation, training, selections etc. They therefore serve as a reference point when human resources management practices are being developed or when decisions are being made about an organization's workforce.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Society for Human Resource Management</span> Professional human resources membership association

The Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM) is a professional human resources membership association headquartered in Alexandria, Virginia. SHRM promotes the role of HR as a profession and provides education, certification, and networking to its members, while lobbying Congress on issues pertinent to labor management.

Mercer is an American consulting firm founded in 1945. It is one of the four operating subsidiaries of global professional services firm Marsh McLennan. Mercer is headquartered in New York City with offices in 43 countries and operations in 130 countries. The company primarily provides human resources and financial services consulting services to its clients.

Talent management (TM) is the anticipation of required human capital for an organization and the planning to meet those needs. The field has been growing in significance and gaining interest among practitioners as well as in the scholarly debate over the past 10 years, particularly after McKinsey's 1997 research and the 2001 book on The War for Talent. Although much of the previous research focused on private companies and organizations, TM is now also found in public organizations

The Institute for Business Value (IBV) a calibrated concept of IBM - is a business research organization that focuses on managerial and economic issues faced by companies and governments around the world. It has offices in China, India, Ireland, Japan, the Netherlands, South Africa and the United States, and it publishes between 35 and 50 major studies each year.

E-HRM is the planning, implementation and application of information technology for both networking and supporting at least two individual or collective actors in their shared performing of HR activities.

Staff management is the management of subordinates in an organization. Often, large organizations have many of these functions performed by a specialist department, such as personnel or human resources, but all line managers are still required to supervise and administer the activities and ensure the well-being of the staff that report to them.

The war for talent is a term coined by Steven Hankin of McKinsey & Company in 1997, and a book by Ed Michaels, Helen Handfield-Jones, and Beth Axelrod, Harvard Business Press, 2001 ISBN 978-1-57851-459-5. The war for talent refers to an increasingly competitive landscape for recruiting and retaining talented employees. In the book, Michaels, et al., describe not a set of superior Human Resources processes, but a mindset that emphasizes the importance of talent to the success of organizations.

Human resource planning is a process that identifies current and future human resources needs for an organization to achieve its goals. Human resource planning should serve as a link between human resource management and the overall strategic plan of an organization. Ageing workers population in most western countries and growing demands for qualified workers in developing economies have underscored the importance of effective human resource planning.

Human Resource (HR) metrics are measurements used to determine the value and effectiveness of HR initiatives, typically including such areas as turnover, training, return on human capital, costs of labor, and expenses per employee.

Tina Piermarini is an American entrepreneur and Fortune 100 executive. She designed and implemented marketing and business development strategies for global companies. Piermarini studies how information technology can continue to support business growth in the industry. Her works have been published in several periodicals including: World Energy, Energy Business and Technology; and on the website: eds.com.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Johnny C. Taylor Jr.</span> American lawyer and author

Johnny Clayton Taylor Jr. is an American lawyer, author, board member and public speaker who is the president and chief executive officer of the Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM). He was previously president and CEO of the Thurgood Marshall College Fund (TMCF), which represents the 47 publicly-supported historically Black colleges and universities in the United States. In February 2018, President Donald Trump appointed Taylor chair of the President's Advisory Board on Historically Black Colleges and Universities. He is vice chair of the University of Miami, and trustee of Jobs for America’s Graduates. Taylor sits on the corporate boards of Guild Education, Internet Collaborative Information Management Systems (ICIMS), and XPO Logistics.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Zabeen Hirji</span>

Zabeen Hirji is a former Chief Human Resources Officer and a former member of the Royal Bank of Canada (RBC) Group Executive in Toronto from 2007 - 2017. A native of Tanzania, she immigrated to Vancouver, Canada, in 1974 and joined the RBC as a teller in 1977, advancing through various departments until acceding to her position as CHRO in 2007. She is a prominent advocate and spokesperson for diversity and inclusion in Canadian business, and has received numerous awards for championing the advancement of women and minorities. She was listed in the 2001 edition of Who's Who in Canadian Business and the 2009 edition of Canadian Who's Who.

A human resources management system (HRMS) or Human Resources Information System (HRIS) or Human Capital Management (HCM) is a form of Human Resources (HR) software that combines a number of systems and processes to ensure the easy management of human resources, business processes and data. Human resources software is used by businesses to combine a number of necessary HR functions, such as storing employee data, managing payroll, recruitment, benefits administration, time and attendance, employee performance management, and tracking competency and training records.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Kathleen Hogan</span> American business executive

Kathleen Hogan is Executive Vice President for human resources and Chief People Officer at Microsoft.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Paula Caligiuri</span> Psychologist, author

Paula Caligiuri is an American academic, talent management specialist, psychologist, book author, and entrepreneur. As a Distinguished Professor of international business and strategy, she is on the faculty at D'Amore-McKim School of Business, Northeastern University. Her published contributions in the field of international human resource management have won academic distinctions, and been endorsed in scholarly literature and in wider professional circles. Among her books, Get a Life, Not a Job, Managing the Global Workforce,Cultural Agility: Building a Pipeline of Successful Global Professionals, and Build Your Cultural Agility: The Nine Competencies of Successful Global Professionals, received attention by qualified media. In 2023, she wrote Live for a Living: How to Create your Career Journey to Work Happier, Not Harder with Andrew Palmer (Technologist), which focuses on career development. She is ranked # 392 among the best business and management scientists in the US, 810 worldwide.

References

  1. ↑ Maura, Ciccarelli. "Trust at the Top". Human Resource Executive Online. Archived from the original on 25 November 2011. Retrieved 6 November 2011.
  2. ↑ "HR Policy Association Board of Directors Roster". HR Policy Association. Retrieved 5 November 2011.
  3. ↑ "The 21st Century Chief Human Resource Officer". Deloitte. 2006-04-04. Retrieved 26 August 2009.
  4. ↑ "The Chief Human Resources Officer: Key Challenges & Strategies for Success" (PDF). Cornell University Center for Advanced Human Resource Studies. 2008-06-27. Archived from the original (PDF) on 2017-08-02. Retrieved 2010-01-19.
  5. ↑ Wright, Patrick. "The Changing Chief Human Resources Officer Role" (PDF). University of South Carolina Darla Moore School of Business. Retrieved 9 August 2017.
  6. ↑ Boudreau, John W.; Peter M. Ramstad (2007). Beyond HR: The New Science of Human Capital. Harvard Business School Publishing.
  7. ↑ "Principal Chief Human Resource Officer Concerns" (PDF). HR Policy Association. Archived from the original (PDF) on 2022-06-10. Retrieved August 17, 2017.
  8. ↑ "Faculty - Darla Moore School of Business - University of South Carolina". Archived from the original on 2014-02-01. Retrieved 2014-01-31.
  9. ↑ cipositions.
  10. ↑ Hueslid, Mark; Richard Beatty; Brian Becker (December 2005). "The Strategic Logic of Workforce Management" (PDF). Harvard Business Review: 110–117. Retrieved 3 September 2011.
  11. ↑ "Principal Chief Human Resource Officer Concerns 2011" (PDF). HR Policy Association. Archived from the original (PDF) on 2022-06-10. Retrieved 3 September 2011.
  12. ↑ "Functional Responsibilities of the CHRO". HR Policy Association. Archived from the original on 1 August 2012. Retrieved 3 September 2011.
  13. ↑ "Working Beyond Borders: Insights from the Global Chief Human Resource Officer Study". IBM Corp. p. 3.
  14. ↑ Becoming Top CHRO. TOPCHRO, Retrieved 2020-02-07
  15. ↑ Wright, Patrick. "The Sorry State of CHRO Succession". View From the Top. HR Policy Association. Retrieved 3 September 2011.
  16. ↑ Conaty and Charan (2010). The Talent Masters. Crown Business. ISBN   978-0307460264.
  17. ↑ Wright, Patrick (2011). The Chief HR Officer: Defining the New Role of Human Resource Leaders. San Francisco: John Wiley & Sons.
  18. ↑ Wright. The Chief HR Officer. p. 26.
  19. ↑ Wright (2011-04-19). The Chief HR Officer. John Wiley & Sons. p. 74. ISBN   978-0470905340.
  20. ↑ Conaty and Charan (2010). The Talent Masters. Crown Business. p. 2. ISBN   978-0307460264.
  21. ↑ Conaty and Charan (2010). The Talent Masters. Crown Business. p. 227. ISBN   978-0307460264.
  22. ↑ Conaty and Charan (2010). The Talent Masters. Crown Business. pp. 93–94. ISBN   978-0307460264.
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