Many chief human resources officers (CHROs) are striving to play a central role in shaping business strategy and growth. Yet showing the impact of people-related decisions on long-established business KPIs remains a challenge. AI and data analytics offer new possibilities.
The challenge is well known: initiatives in the areas of corporate culture and leadership are strategically crucial but their impact is more difficult to quantify than traditional financial initiatives.
Drawing on his nearly 20 years of experience in finance and business roles prior to becoming CHRO in 2018, Foster is keen to bring a metrics-driven mindset into HR, which he entered in 2018.
Foster’s function is driving a change-management exercise to clarify ownership and accountability along the entire customer journey.
That’s not to say that HR has been lacking in useful metrics in the past. Recruitment and retention data, for example, can illustrate the function’s ability to help secure business-critical skills and avoid costly employee turnover. Employee performance data reflects the success of HR’s recruitment techniques and helps to refine them.
Similarly, employee satisfaction data secured from regular pulse surveys and larger studies can showcase HR performance in driving engagement and fulfilment.
However, many of these traditional HR metrics have not always resonated at C-suite level as strongly as intended. ”The key is to focus on the metrics that are most relevant to C-level colleagues and support them to make decisions, thereby showing how the HR department contributes directly to business success,” says Foster.
The current focus of Sunrise’s HR team on clarifying ownership and accountability shows how the function can contribute directly to business objectives.
Through the merger with telecommunications provider UPC five years ago, Sunrise became Switzerland’s second-largest telecoms business. However, market saturation means growth cannot be achieved solely by attracting new customers. Customer relationships and customer loyalty are therefore becoming more important. As a result, Sunrise is focusing on innovation, service quality, and rewarding loyalty in order to improve customer retention and relationships.
To support this objective, Foster’s function is driving a change-management exercise to clarify ownership and accountability along the entire customer journey. The objective is to ensure that the right teams are empowered to deliver best customer experience, from onboarding to regular service, and inquiries or complaints.
“We’ve agreed the outcome we want to achieve together with our colleagues from the business unit and then mapped who is responsible for contributing to that outcome and how we measure it,” Foster says. “In doing so, we’ve looked at which systems or processes might be hindering those contributions and helped different business units to work together to achieve the best results and meet the objectives.”
As the HR department plays a key role in organizing business units and improving processes, it can make a significant and tangible contribution to increasing customer satisfaction and customer loyalty, and thereby to achieving strategic objectives.
Foster and his HR team also plays an active role in strengthening cross-functional collaboration.
“Collaboration really matters to all of us and is imperative to achieving strategic goals,” he says. “In practice, HR has aligned its own objectives to support collaboration between different teams and units in the organization with those of the company’s executives. This is a typical example of how HR and the C-suite are working on the same strategic business targets.”
“The key is to integrate data, so that every function, including HR, can understand the impact it is having.”
More broadly, Foster believes it is becoming increasingly important for HR departments to align their data analysis and reported metrics with targeted business outcomes. HR departments should stop thinking about HR metrics in isolation. Instead, they should link them to commercial metrics such as productivity.
”The key is to integrate data, so that every function, including HR, can understand the impact it is having,” says Foster. “For example, by combining employee engagement data with productivity indicators, HR can help leaders understand how people-related factors influence operational performance.”
AI is also opening up new possibilities in areas such as skills mapping and succession planning. Sunrise’s HR function has already begun to trial AI in mapping the organization’s skills needs to the talents of its workforce, identifying candidates for critical roles. It’s also experimenting with an AI agent that sets more precise performance targets.
Foster sees AI offering opportunities to take a more holistic view of HR and business data: “We can move towards a data-driven approach, rather than following mainly qualitative metrics as we have in the past.”
Foster’s metrics-governed finance and business background means he welcomes this shift. He believes his financial and business training gives him a distinct lens through which to reassess HR strategy. “My background allows me to engage confidently in in-depth discussions on investment, value creation, and business planning, positioning HR where it belongs: at the heart of strategic decision‑making.”
IMD’s Katharina Lange explains how CHROs can strike a balance between respecting employee opinions and preserving organizational performance and integrity....
The CHRO should be at the heart of modern business strategy says Jaclyn Lee of Singapore’s security service provider, Certis....
Identify signs of pseudo-engagement and apply leadership-focused actions to turn surface satisfaction into real team results....
Question your talent practices: a guide to evaluating resource allocation for age diversity and enhancing problem solving....
Explore first person business intelligence from top minds curated for a global executive audience