Auditing the effectiveness of your HR department

Part: One

In the first of two articles, HR influencer Dave Ulrich and Joe Grochowski, managing director of The RBL Institute, show how to audit the effectiveness of your HR department

Dave Ulrich

PS Contributor

For the last 30 years, the RBL Group has been on the forefront of HR transformation.  We believe that HR is not about HR, but HR begins and ends with business.  We find that many who focus on HR transformation are focused almost exclusively on how to organise the HR department.  We believe in designing the right HR department, but focusing ONLY on the HR department is a narrow focus of the overall effectiveness of HR. 

As we have done empirical research with over 100,000 respondents and advisory services with dozens and dozens of HR leaders, we have distilled nine dimensions of an effective HR department.

These nine criteria for an HR department may be seen as delivering value at four stages:

1. Foundational/Administrative: HR focuses on efficiency
2. Functional: HR focuses on best practices
3. Strategic: HR focuses on delivering strategy
4. Outside in: HR focuses on stakeholders outside the organisation

This results in a matrix that can be used to audit the overall effectiveness of an HR department. Here we look at the first four of the nine domains: reputation, definition of success, strategy and design.

Review the domains by the four stages of HR departments and assess where your HR department is today.  Use a scale from 1 to 10, with 1 being ‘low’ and 10 being ‘high', to assess your HR department in each domain and stage.

The challenge is that you can’t do everything well, so if you’ve already addressed the low hanging fruit, think about what you can decide to stop doing.  You may be doing work in HR that the business loves you for that isn’t in line with where the business is going. How do you manage that? It’s about being aggressive with priorities. 

Part: Two

In the second of two articles, HR influencer Dave Ulrich and Joe Grochowski, managing director of The RBL Institute, show how to audit the effectiveness of your HR department

How do you know if your organisation needs an HR effectiveness audit? Our research with more than 100,000 respondents and advisory services and many HR leaders enabled us to distill the nine dimensions of an effective HR department and create a matrix that can be used to audit the overall effectiveness of an HR department.
These nine criteria for an HR department may be seen as delivering value at four stages:

1. Foundational/Administrative: HR focuses on efficiency
2. Functional: HR focuses on best practices
3. Strategic: HR focuses on delivering strategy
4. Outside in: HR focuses on stakeholders outside the organisation

Previously we looked at the first four of the nine domains: reputation, definition of success, strategy and design. In this article we explore the remaining five: organisation capability, analytics, practices, professionals and work style.
To audit your effectiveness, review the domains by the four stages of HR departments and assess where your HR department is today.  Use a scale from 1 to 10, with 1 being ‘low’ and 10 being ‘high’, to assess your HR department in each domain and stage.






You won’t be able to do everything well.  So, take the nine domains in total and focus on one or two.  For, you get into trouble when you try to do all things equally!

The nine criteria for an effective HR department build upon and extend, the RBL Group’s empirical research and books in a number of areas, such as our 13 milestones of HR transformation (HR Transformation), the research results from round seven of the HR Competency Study (HRCS), research from Leadership Brand – RBL’s organisation capability audit tool, RBL’s four practices of an HR department, RBL’s work on HR value creation and HR from the Outside In', and HR department questions from the book ‘Victory through Organization’.