Regional HR Leaders Share Experiences on Recent HR Realignment Strategies: No Easy Fix for Medium-Sized Companies

The Chapman Consulting Group today hosted an HR roundtable discussion for 18 select HR Heads. Regional HR Leaders from the likes of Procter & Gamble, BP, IBM, Hewlett-Packard, DHL, PepsiCo, UBS and a number of other high profile multinationals met over lunch at the Singapore Cricket Club to discuss the topic of "HR Leadership Strategies to Effectively Structure Regional HR Team Responsibilities and Maximise Productivity in the Current Economic Climate".

Leaders discussed the impact of current unpredictable economic conditions on HR strategy and decision-making. There was a general consensus among attendees that now more than ever the HR team is being put under pressure to achieve immediate results in alignment with business imperatives. These imperatives varied widely between participants across industry sector and company. For some it meant that HR must be extremely ‘high touch’, flexible and customised in its approach; for others it meant the adoption of HR Shared Service strategies that help to streamline regional HR decision-making; and for others still it meant the continued adoption of technologies to further automate processes and ensure high user accessibility.

With current market forces putting pressure on HR budgets, expatriate terms, travel budgets and employee bonuses, the pressure to optimise productivity is affecting everyone. A significant amount of today’s discussion centred around the different ways in which HR teams are structured, and it became apparent that there is no ‘one size fits all' HR model when it comes to regional HR teams in Asia. Some leaders represented companies where the business was implementing a new ‘Centre of Excellence’ model, while others had found more return on investment by collapsing their regional model to return to a more traditional approach. The scale of the company was the main factor playing a part in the decision to go one way or another, leaving particularly medium-sized companies with a hard decision to make.

The question of whether to retain critical processes in-house versus moving to outsourced arrangements in efforts to enhance productivity was also addressed. Some leaders talked about success with outsourcing agreements, but cautioned that it was difficult to see short-term positive results and that a long-term approach was needed. Experiences ranged from those who had seen numerous failed reorganisation implementations to those who had penned successful 10-year long-term arrangements. The group agreed that the argument for outsourcing is less clear-cut in pure Asia Pacific Japan structures that aren’t linked to global alignments, as the cost savings in this region are not as great as in Europe or North America, and the potential complications due to regional variations can make the resulting ‘solution’ seem like a misnomer. Companies looking for a ‘quick fix’ to their systemic organisational problems should not assume that a consultant or an outsourced partner can take on something which the organisation themselves couldn’t get to grips with. So the key question before outsourcing was whether an in-sourced Shared Services model could first be put into effect. Again, our participants experienced varying degrees of success with this experiment, and some had purposefully shunned it altogether in favour of keeping greater control of HR services.