Why GBS Must Prioritize Employee Well-Being, Development, and Mentoring

Many organizations struggle to find the magic solution to attract, engage, and retain their employees and this has been a pain point long before the pandemic added another layer of complexity to the HR leaders role in solving these challenges.

Barbara Hodge, Global Online editor of SSON, and Host of the SSSONext podcast, sat down with Simon Brown and Gerard Hussey to discuss solutions. Simon Brown is a podcaster and columnist for SSON, he provides experienced advice, both strategic and operational, giving hands-on support to match your Business/HR Transformation and Organizational Change Management needs. Gerard Hussey specializes in the redesign of HR Operating Models and HR Service Delivery Models. He serves as an advisor to organizations through all stages of cloud technology implementation, and offers specialist support in the development and optimization of People Analytics.

Highlights from the SSON Analytics survey on HR and Talent

We at SSON ran an extensive survey on the talent within GBS. Simon contributed to the study with his expertise and helped develop the survey as well as analyze the results, and the results will be published as a report. Here are some of the qualitative highlights:

1. In a shared services model (as many of us may be aware) the majority of the work is still focused on finance and accounting. But HR has consistently been a good back-up. And over the past ten years or so, we have noticed this trend increasing. And for the first time ever, we examined the position of HR in the Global Business Services landscape in this year’s survey.
2. A universal concern on the HR front is leadership as it relates to employee expectations. It has become clear from an extended period of crisis and change that models need to be reevaluated. Simon says, “What we're seeing now number one for leaders is to support the employee’s well-being. Around 53%, of multicountry, shared services leaders put that as their number one responsibility. Inspiring and motivating their employees to do their best work is second, and ensuring employees are paid competitively is third.”
3. The maturity level of GBS is increasing. There's clear evidence that among larger operations, the multifunction, multi-country are the ones that are the most mature, and therefore by definition, if HR is slow to embrace GBS, then its level of maturity will be less. If you want to accelerate your maturity, Gerard advises that you focus on becoming part of government services, because they're the cross-fertilization across all the functions and have LEAN process expertise.
4. How does HR leadership differ across different segments and company sizes? The survey is segmented by large companies and small companies with multiple points of cross-referencing. Simon highlights that the larger the size of GBS or HR organization, there is more focus needed on regular communications because they're working in a virtual and hybrid world. Whereas for some organizations that have less than 4000 employees, and are in a single country, some of the more traditional ways of management continue.
5. A key area that came up in the survey is career development. This is very important for the attraction, retention, and motivation of talent.
6. Another area is mentoring. Mentoring has proven to be one of the most flexible, easy to deploy, and relatively low-cost methods for establishing learning and development within an organization. The survey shows that 40% of shared services and GBS organizations have a mentoring program in place. This leaves a large gap in the industry where mentoring is not yet available for employees in their organization.
7. Certifications in the industry are becoming more common. We at SSON offer a GBS certification program and 64% of all of the people surveyed said they'd be very interested to complete this certification to enhance their professional development. That shows that accreditation in GBS is seen as an important development opportunity.

Enjoy the audio medium? You’ll find a lot more detail in this full discussion between Barbara Hodge Simon Brown and Gerard Hussey, here on Spotify.