What Your HR Team Does Best May Be Hiding What It Needs Most

Your HR team’s strengths can make its gaps harder to see. Strong compliance practices, for example, may coexist with limited capacity to develop managers or use talent analytics — capabilities your organization needs to achieve its next goal.

SHRM’s comprehensive research report, The Business Case for HR Excellence (HR-X), found that only 1 in 8 (12%) of the HR functions surveyed had achieved high maturity. Most organizations (80%) ranked as average HR maturity, indicating solid foundations alongside opportunities for improvement. 

Reviewing assessment results with your HR colleagues can help you agree on which capability gaps matter most and where to focus development and investment to support your organization’s goals.

Build a Shared View of HR Maturity

The SHRM HR Excellence (HR-X) Framework organizes an HR function’s full scope of responsibilities into four foundational dimensions: Functional Acceleration, Talent Optimization, Market Discernment, and Organizational Impact. Together, these dimensions encompass 16 core practice areas (e.g., Recruiting, Employee Experience) and more than 70 subpractice areas.

The framework gives you and your colleagues a common structure for reviewing how HR supports organizational success. A recruiting leader may struggle to attract candidates with particular skills. Your L&D colleagues may see opportunities to develop those skills internally, while a colleague overseeing HR technology may identify the systems needed to support that work.

Look Beyond the Strongest Practice Areas

SHRM’s research found that HR functions generally showed greater maturity in compliance and employee relations than in learning and development, talent analytics, and leadership and manager development. Strength in one area can sit alongside gaps in another.

Recognizing that unevenness is the first step toward building the capabilities your organization needs.

If your organization is preparing to expand, for example, established compliance processes may support current operations, while growth requires stronger workforce planning, leadership development, or recruiting. Identifying those needs together can help you agree on where to focus development and investment.

Connect Development to Business Outcomes

SHRM’s analysis found that each one-point increase in an organization’s HR maturity was associated with approximately $62,000 more revenue per full-time equivalent, even after accounting for organizational size, industry, and sector.

In the report’s hypothetical comparison of two otherwise similar manufacturing companies with 1,000 workers each, SHRM explained that this one-point difference in HR maturity for one company translates into approximately $62 million in additional predicted annual revenue.

For you and your colleagues, the practical question is which capabilities do you need to advance to support your organization’s goals.

Bring Colleagues Who Can Apply the Learning

A shared understanding of your development priorities can help you and your colleagues plan your learning at SHRM HR-X Live! Each of you can focus on one of the four HR-X dimensions at a learning level suited to your needs, building different capabilities that support a shared organizational goal.

If your organization faces talent shortages, for example, you might focus on recruiting while your colleagues strengthen capabilities in learning and development or HR technology. Back at work, you can bring those lessons together to build a coordinated approach to attracting candidates, developing skills internally, and improving the systems supporting both.