How to develop an

How to develop an
HR scorecard
By: Sanjiv Anand
Global Managing Director,
Cedar
Special to Gulf News
In keeping with the spirit of making the HR function more valuable
and effective for organizations, I will focus today’s discussion
around the development of an HR scorecard.
The HR scorecard is built on the principle of the balanced scorecard.
It’s a cockpit view of a department/company, Building an HR
scorecard will help determine what are the top 20-25 HR objectives
that an HR department needs to be focused on, what are the
performance measures and targets to achieve those objectives,
and what are the top 10-15 projects that need to be done to deliver
the agreed to strategic objectives.
Since the HR department is not a revenue generator, the top most
perspective for an HR department’s scorecard is meeting internal
customer expectations. Customers from an HR perspective could be
unions, employees, line managers and senior management. What
are the key customer expectations that the HR department needs
to meet during the course of the year? They could be around
managing career planning, compensation, training and skills
development, etc.
The second perspective is financial. In order to meet the above
customer expectations, what are the key financial objectives that
an HR department could have? These could be around meeting its
own internal HR budgets, ensuring that compensation and
manpower budgets are on target, and also potentially ensuring that
the IT system investments in HR have resulted in the efficiency
gains.
In order to meet customer and financial expectations, HR needs to
excel at key processes. There could be 50 processes within HR, but
from an organisation’s standpoint no more than 20 per cent may be
mission critical. The idea is to identify those and ensure they are
excelled at. These could be recruiting, performance appraisal,
change management, etc. It depends where in the company is its
current life cycle.
Lastly, the HR department itself needs to have the right human
capital framework and technology. Human capital framework
includes having the right structure, clarity in roles and
responsibilities, compensation, competencies, and the appropriate
reward and recognition framework. On the technology side, over 80
per cent of HR transactions are administrative in nature and there
are multiple IT systems available to automate those functions.
Once the HR head has identified the top 20-25 HR objectives using
the above framework it is important to identify 20-25 performance
measures to track HR performance. While HR tries to make
employees performance and target oriented, it often fails to
recognise that it has the same responsibilities for itself. Reporting
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performance once a month to senior management helps
demonstrate performance of the HR organisation.
In the Middle East and Asia, finding quality HR professionals is
always a challenge. By putting a HR scorecard together, one
ensures that the HR team is all focused on delivering commonly
identified objectives. The ensures that a average quality
department delivers significant value.
While the HR will never be a revenue generator, by building a
performance oriented HR organisation, it will ensure that the
revenue drivers in the organisation have the right support to drive
enterprise financial performance. And for once, HR will not be
considered to be theoretical and blue sky oriented, but a true
support organisation.
Sanjiv Anand, Global Managing Director
Sanjiv has over 25 years of global management consulting experience across North America,
Europe, South Africa, Middle East, and Asia. He has been assisting clients in the area of
business strategy using the Balanced Scorecard methodology, business and
organizational/HR transformation, customer service strategy and IT strategy.
He is a recognized thought leader on Balanced Scorecard & has built & managed over 250
Balanced Scorecard projects across the world. He is a recognized speaker at a number of
conferences, and a number of his articles have been published. He was a key speaker at a
Balanced Scorecard conference with Prof. Kaplan where he focused on the issue of 19
challenges in the successful implementation of the Scorecard.
Sanjiv has provided strategic & subject matter leadership to several real estate & related
clients in the areas of strategy formulation, implementation, Balanced Scorecard, market
assessments, organizational transformation and change management,. His real estate and
related clients include Union Properties, Deyaar, Amlak, Al Fahim Group, Al Ghurair Group,
Arrow Infrastructure, DB Realty, and Gammon among others.
Prior to this assignment, Sanjiv was a Director in the US practice, and based in Chicago and
New York for over 5 years, was responsible for developing strategy for clients in the US and
European market.
Sanjiv has completed the Advanced Management Program at Harvard Business School. He
also has a BE in Electrical Engineering, and an MBA from the Stern Graduate School of
Business, New York University. He writes regularly for leading periodicals. He is the current
membership chair and past chapter chair of the YPO Bombay Chapter.
McGraw Hill has recently published Sanjiv’s book titled “Unlocking Human Capital to Drive
Performance”
About Cedar
Cedar is a global consulting, advisory and analytics firm. With over 25 years of experience and 500 professionals in its network,
Cedar has assisted more than 1,000 clients across industry sectors. Formerly part of Renaissance Worldwide, a $1 Billion
consulting firm, co-founded by the creators of the Balanced Scorecard, Cedar has significant capability in the international market
strategy, business strategy development, organizational and operational transformation. Cedar, winner of the 2010, 2011 & 2012
Industry Award for The Best Advisory Firm, is headquartered in the US and has a network of offices in 16 locations, worldwide.
New York Chicago London Paris Dubai Mumbai Seoul Singapore Shanghai Tokyo Brussels Munich Sao Paulo Mexico City Johannesburg.
For more information, please visit www.cedar-consulting.com
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