Overview of CIPD’s HR Profession Map

1.0 Introduction
This report has been produced for a new HR practitioner entering into Companies House. This report it outlines The Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development (CIPD) HR Profession Map and how this feeds into timely and effective service delivery from professional HR practitioners. The HR Profession Map (HRPM) developed by CIPD is a useful wide-ranging visionary tool of how HR can add value to the organisation it operates in. The map covers skills, behaviours and knowledge that HR people require in order to become a successful HR professional. It also helps to identify areas that people may need to be developed. The map provides support to individuals as they recognise development needs for their career progression which in turn helps the practitioner acquire the knowledge, skills and behaviours to deliver timely and effective HR services to its customers. The information for this report has been collected from the CIPD website and the HR map.

1.1 Findings
The HR Profession Map holds two professional core areas that cover insights, strategy and solutions as well as Leading HR. Insights, Strategy and Solutions is where the professional fosters legitimate insights and solutions, which aid understanding in the business and how it works (or should work), and allows well-defined strategies to be developed and implemented in order to improve things. Leading HR is where a prominent HR professional has active, insight-led leadership; they own, shape and drive themselves, others and activity within the business. Some professionals may not have a role where they lead others but it is still important that they develop and grow in the other two dimensions. The map also shows eight other professional areas of service delivery and information, organisation design, organisation development, resourcing and talent planning, learning and talent development, performance and reward, employee engagement and employee relations these areas are what proficient HR practitioners need to know. The eight behaviours are Curious, decisive thinker, skilled influencer, personally credible, collaborative, driven to deliver, courage to challenge and role model and these show how a HR practitioner should carry out activities. The four bands of professional competence are from 1 to 4 and these show the different levels of experience of practitioners.

1.1.1 Employee Relations
This professional area protects the organisation’s relationship with its staff and unions. It should be managed clearly and by relevant employment law. I would relate my role to band 2 as I deal a lot with trade union relations, grievance & disciplinary and health & wellbeing policies. I am driven to deliver, have the courage to challenge and influence in conflict management.

2.0 How a HR Practitioner ensures the Service they provide is timely and Effective

2.1 Three Examples of Different Customers and One Need for Each and Explain how to Prioritise Conflicting Needs.

1. The Line Manager will have a recruitment need from HR. The Line Manager will want assistance with job specifications, job descriptions, job advertisements, sifting, interview questions, interviews, coordination of the administration related to hiring the candidate and they will want this done now. 2. The Trade Union will have a collective bargaining need from HR. Collective bargaining I the process in which the union and senior management meet in partnership to discuss terms/conditions, wages, benefits, hours and other every day working issues. These meetings can be very stressful and can sometimes end with neither party agreeing. Great importance is placed upon reaching an agreement as to fend off any further ramifications such as industrial action.

3. The Employee will have a need from HR to facilitate the grievance procedure. The employee could have a grievance about terms and conditions, workplace restructure, discrimination case, personality clashes in the workplace, bullying and harassment or even a case of poor performance. A formal meeting should be held within five working days of the grievance being received. Any grievance should be dealt with promptly in line with the ACAS code. There are lots of conflicting demands on HR, which range from trivial to crucial. The HR practitioner has to be able to maintain a system of prioritisation for all requests and ignore none. The practitioner should weigh up the impact of each and every request to the organisation, the individual and make their decisions accordingly.

2.2 Three Examples of Different Communication Methods and the Advantages and Disadvantages of each Employee Surveys – there are advantages for organisations that use workplace employee opinion surveys; they range from improvements to the workplace to measuring job satisfaction and engagement. The survey can also ask specific questions about workplace concerns, salaries, benefits or learning & development. Disadvantages are if the data from the survey is shelved and never acted upon and this defeats the fundamental purpose of the survey which is to gather information and measurements for human resource managers to create and implement new policies and procedures that will have a positive effect on the employees overall job satisfaction and working wellbeing. Email – advantages of using email is the speed of the communication to the customer or employee. Email is faster than the telephone and you can also send attachments which could contain important documentation.

Availability of email is also a plus as you can store as many email messages into folders on your computer or your mobile phone for easy access. Email is also cost effective as it is free and you can save money on businesses postage. Disadvantages are that emails are emotionless as there is no personal interaction and emails can therefore get misinterpreted. Emails systems can be vulnerable to system crashes therefore you can lose vast amounts of information if you have not saved your email information onto another server; also email could be intercepted via a hacker. Team Meetings – advantages of team meetings are that they allow team members to get away from the office environment to meet together to discuss various workplace issues and topics. A credible chair person would be needed to follow the agenda and direct the meeting which could result in brainstorming sessions and help foster collaborative working and employee engagement. Disadvantages are that if the meeting has no agenda that the meeting could fall apart then employees will use the meeting as an opportunity to moan and gripe instead of using the time constructively. Team meetings can also result in conflict due to employees different personalities clashing.

2.3 How to Build and Maintain Effective Service Delivery In today’s business environment it has become a huge priority for all organisations to provide a successful HR service delivery. Human relationships are important in business; building and maintaining those relationships is equally as important. Quality relationships with the business commence with HR members knowing how to manage the expectations of their customers; they need to be effective listeners, have consistency of performance, responsiveness to resolve issues quickly, be proactive but also demonstrate the art of accountability. A knowledgeable HR practitioner should work within budget; adhere to any service level agreements. Traditionally, SLAs have been a mechanism to gauge the quality of services. Properly structured SLAs can be used to measure the quality of the transactional service provided and as a basis for quality improvement. SLAs can measure technical things such as uptime, system availability, and process change requests. Companies House is currently facing the prospect of entering into shared services; our HR goals include: • Achieving operational efficiencies

• Managing the talent supply
• Improving the delivery of HR services
• Developing leadership
We have built a robust business case to keep services in-house as number one aspect is cost: we evaluated what we would spend with outside partners, we then tallied our in-house resources and determined the value we were getting for that “all-in” HR spend. That led us to evaluating what we keep in-house and be more efficient at delivering. Of course, we didn’t want to keep it all as it made sense to look at each piece for cost-effectiveness, so we will have to let pay role go to a shared service platform, this will probably happen in 2014. We also looked at what was strategic vs. transactional – we wanted to focus on where we could add value and where possible, we wanted to take retained professional HR staff out of the transactional equation. We want to keep proficient staff that are able to think outside of the box, embrace new ideas and will be able to problem solve when handling complaints and dealing with difficult customers.

3.0 The CIPD Associate Membership Criteria

3.1& 3.3 The importance of Continuous Professional Development (CPD) for meeting development needs

A CPD is a continual process of lifelong learning. I believe it follows a cycle of four stages; reflection, planning, action and evaluation. It should include everything that you learn that makes you better able to do your job.

Whilst producing my own CPD I have highlighted two long-term developmental needs to concentrate on:

• Maintains and produces management information – maintains HR record systems and individual records, with full, accurate and appropriate information and in line with data protection laws and regulations – Personal development area for me to learn a specialism and work at team leader level with staff responsibility – I will attend on the job training with the HR Advisory team and learn all aspects recruitment. • The wider HR context – communicate effectively with all employees at different levels – Personal development for me to liaise with experts and to gain the knowledge in order to carry out stewardship at a higher level – I will be attending seminars, workshops in London at the Cabinet Office on the Civil Service Reform and planning for Employee Engagement.