What is HR Operational Excellence?

“‘Operational Excellence’ or ‘Execution excellence’ is the execution of the strategy more consistently and reliably’. Operational excellence is evidenced by results."

"Operationally Excellent HR function will have better customer satisfaction,  lower operating costs, increased productivity  and better efficiency thereby creating higher value to it's customers (employees, candidates, managers, business leaders)."

Process Management, Lean Six Sigma in the past were alien to HR professional. HR function is increasingly seeing the benefit of adopting operational excellence tools and principles. This enables HR business partners to be startegic advisors and HR centre of excellence professionals to be functional experts by taking away transactional processes from their hands. 

Adopting operational excellence tools and principles enables HR function to create value to its internal and external customers by improving HR policies, processes, services, technology and data. Operationally excellent HR function stive for better employee experience, process efficiency, consumer grade people services and data driven people decisions.

Automating admin heavy HR processes using next generation technologies like RPA/AI, digitalising services with excellent user experience design and creating reliable people data to drive quality people decisions are all key to achieving operational excellence in HR function! Operationally excellent HR function look beyond these initiatives and focus on creating a culture of continuous improvement to constantly drive HR improvement initiatives.

Operational excellence and continuous improvements are often used interchangeably. Continuous improvement is an ongoing effort to improve products, services or processes incrementally. Operational excellence is about creating a mindset of continuous improvement by adopting the right tools and principles.

Achieving Operational Excellence requires successful implementation of an integrated business execution system that effectively integrates four key building blocks.

HR Operational Excellence Strategy is focussed around these 4 building blocks to create HR customer value

Let's explore the four building blocks of the HR OpEx Strategy.

HR Strategy Deployment          

• Translating HR Strategy to strategic objectives and HR Programs and deployment of HR programs consistently within the business.
• HR strategic initiatives looked in the context of E2E employee life cycle to deliver excellent employee experience and best in class results.

HR Performance Management

• Identifying Key performance indicators and setting targets to achieve strategic objectives.
• Deploying HR balanced scorecard with productivity measures to keep a track on numers that matters.
• Constantly monitoring and evaluating the KPI against best in class.

HR Process & Service Excellence

• Managing processes & services to consistently deliver best in class results
• Identify process and service improvement initiatives by deploying Lean Six Sigma thinking.
• Managing and delivering continuous improvement intitiatives to achieve excellent results in HR processes and services delivery.

High Performing Teams

• Creating a mindset of data driven continuous improvement within HR by deploying continuous improvement champions 
• Enhancing hard skills in process improvement and project management within HR function.
• Evaluating HR capabilities required to succeed esp. in digital, data and analytics.
• Bringing HR operational excellence into the HR leadership table