What Executives Need to Know About HR Maturity Assessments

When an organization wants to build a new department, shore up an existing team, or acquire an outside organization, it looks to HR. The HR team’s readiness to support these initiatives indicates its maturity. 

A mature HR function is fully integrated with the business and has the talent, tools, and strategic leadership direction it needs to fully support the organization’s goals. An immature function, meanwhile, lacks those resources and positioning and, therefore, cannot effectively or reliably bolster the business.

A maturity audit measures HR’s ability to navigate its current and future environments successfully,” explains Brenda Rogers, CHRO of consulting firm HR Strategies, who has led maturity audit efforts across several organizations.

“This assessment evaluates HR across its verticals to capture the organization’s performance in each category, adds Nadia Eran, chief people advisor at Future in Work,” which conducts maturity assessments as part of its work helping startups and scaling companies develop their people infrastructure and strategy to keep up with fast growth. 

Potential outcomes of an HR maturity audit depend on the organization’s strengths and what was measured. They can be wide-ranging, from the realization that the hiring process should be more proactive or to a shift in mindset around work location policies, such as allowing more hybrid work. The bottom line: A good audit leads to discernible outcomes that improve the success of the business.

There are many ways to approach a maturity audit, according to Eran. In fact, there is no gold-standard definition of maturity itself; it depends upon an organization’s size, stage, goals, and resources. 

However a maturity audit is executed, it is a tool used to identify HR’s strengths and weaknesses to drive business opportunities. 

The following guide shows HR practitioners how to create a maturity audit, generate accurate and useful information, and make sense of the results. Readers will understand how to conduct an audit that evaluates whether their organization’s practices meet its current and future needs.

Make Sure an Audit is Necessary

Before beginning a maturity audit, organizations should carefully evaluate whether they’re truly prepared for all that it requires. While a maturity assessment is a powerful exercise, HR should perform it only when necessary and when it has the resources to support the process.

“The point of HR is not HR for HR’s sake. That’s one of our biggest issues around audits and assessments,” Eran said. “We put all this energy, work, time, and money into an assessment. And then the results just sit there because nobody was ready for it, and they were checking off a box.”

“Consider, for example, the possible ramifications of a maturity audit on compensation. The salary benchmarking data needed for this exercise comes at a significant cost,” Eran said. Once acquired, that data can reveal salary gaps that an employer may be obligated to fix, especially if the gaps occur around demographic factors such as race and gender. But what happens when employers lack the budget to fix those gaps?

“Now you know you are in the wrong,” Eran said. “And you’re in a bit of a pickle.”

Eran said this example underscores why HR teams must evaluate business conditions carefully before committing to a maturity audit.

Outside factors can also create the impetus for an HR evaluation. These events include:

• Mergers, acquisitions, divestitures, and other corporate transactions.
• A companywide change in work arrangements.
• External events, such as political change, economic trends, and cultural flash points.
• Bandwidth among HR, leaders, or both.
• New leadership — incoming CHROs often perform an assessment in their first 90 days.
• Performance issues, compliance complications, employee disputes, or other issues that could prompt a reactive look into HR practices.

While an ad hoc approach to audits is helpful, it’s worth noting that some companies may need to hold maturity audits more regularly. Public companies, for example, are typically obligated to evaluate their practices annually. For organizations in this category, Rogers recommends HR leaders perform a formal maturity assessment every year and review progress quarterly.

Assemble the Team

Once HR has determined it’s time to hold a maturity audit, the next step is to decide who will perform it. “Some HR departments do the audit themselves; others tap a third party. Third parties provide clarity in a maturity audit,” Eran said. “Some HR departments may lack the expertise or experience to pinpoint their problems. They may not understand what the next level of operational excellence looks like.”

Third parties eliminate those oversights. They also provide objectivity, as employees may be more forthcoming in surveys, interviews, and focus groups if they’re speaking to someone outside their organization.

“Still, a third party isn’t a requirement,” Eran said. “Smaller, faster maturity assessments can likely be executed in-house. Handling these smaller assessments in-house can also be more cost-effective for teams with sufficient bandwidth, and developing auditing skills within the team can support making maturity audits an ongoing pillar of the HR team’s operations.”

Conducting Evaluations

Just as there are multiple modes of maturity, there are multiple paths to a maturity assessment. They take shape based on an organization’s size, stage, goals, and resources. Maturity assessments can measure a single HR function or multiple areas. They can be conducted annually or on an ad hoc basis. They can be carried out by an in-house HR team or by a third-party advisor. 

No matter the maturity audit’s form, it measures how well an HR function supports an organization’s business goals. Such goals, of course, are ever evolving, and “maturity” looks different at every company. As Eran put it, “Good is a moving target.”

An early-stage company, for instance, shouldn’t pursue the standards of a Fortune 100 company in every — or any — area of its HR operations, according to Eran. “That would be a waste of resources,” she said. “It’s important to manage your weaknesses, but you want to build toward your strengths and do so in a way that takes you to the next level.” In other words, a maturity audit is not a way to shoehorn HR into a standardized mold. Instead, it’s an opportunity to better align the function with the goals of the business, Eran said. 

Rogers sees maturity in a similar light. She describes a mature HR function as one aware of how it’s doing and where it needs to go next based on internal goals and external circumstances. Conversely, immature organizations don’t measure their own performance.

Defining the Scale of Success

After defining maturity, it’s time to dig into the audit. Rogers suggests pairing an anecdotal assessment with a numbered scale. 

Effectively using a numbered scale requires some forethought. Organizations need to design the scale so the numbers represent something standard, that is, values with meaning. This process will refer back to HR’s definition of maturity: What does it look like to achieve a perfect 10?

This approach also allows HR to include more people through focus groups and surveys. A standardized approach to collecting data from multiple sources — including company leadership, HR teams, and employees across the organization — will help auditors determine where they are on the maturity scale and where they’d like to be in the next quarter and the year after.

When Rogers evaluates an organization’s cultural maturity, for example, she asks fellow auditors, leadership, and employees to answer questions with numbers. Respondents are asked to rate the organization’s adherence to its values. Does it support collaboration and communication? Is it transparent about its progress? Does it reward people for aligning with its cultural goals?

Whatever an organization values — innovation, creativity, integrity, flexibility — it should use those qualities as its “measuring stick” in a maturity audit, Rogers said. The higher that employees and other stakeholders rate the organization on the numbered scale, the more aligned it is with its desired culture.

Don't Lose Sight of the Goal

A numbered scale isn’t the only way to perform a maturity assessment, however. There are many approaches to choose from, according to Eran. Those can include benchmarking against industry standards, hearing from focus groups, developing a competency framework, or even conducting a SWOT (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats) analysis to better understand the strategic implications of maturity targets. The key is to design an assessment with a clear goal in mind.

Let’s say an organization wants to perform a quick, checklist-style maturity assessment based on the features of its operations. Depending on its definition of maturity, it may simply check off boxes within its HR verticals. To assess recruiting, HR may acknowledge that its candidate identification methods, interviewing practices, and job offer mechanisms are all satisfactory — but it may flag that its onboarding procedures need development.

The danger of this approach? “The information is actually very complex,” Eran said. “You may not understand what boxes belong in a particular vertical.” This leaves auditors trying to make sense of a space they may not understand and can introduce confusion about the value of the maturity assessment.

“If you lose sight of the value of these things, you end up in the weeds. A maturity assessment is a forest assessment,” Eran explains. “You may find a bit of dead grass. But that patch is not the reason we did the whole assessment.” 

However HR goes about a maturity assessment, it must keep its goal in mind, especially when designing a survey, focus group questions, or another type of assessment.

Synthesizing the Results into Actionable Insights

Creating action items is the most important part of a maturity assessment, Eran said. But how do you get to those action items?

Rogers’ first step is analyzing the results. She looks for outliers, anomalies, and other data that stand out. Then, she determines whether there are topics that need further investigation and a more thorough examination. Once that’s accomplished, Rogers puts the results into a readable chart that she can return to year over year to track trends.

After a plan of action has been developed, it’s time to get input from and alignment with leaders.

Clearly demonstrating the potential ROI of proposed changes stemming from the maturity assessment is critical to getting that alignment. And, of course, HR should make sure its summary demonstrates the value of HR clearly, concisely, and confidently. It helps if HR can rely on strong relationships within the C-suite. 

Once in alignment with leaders, the next step is for auditors to move through the change process, according to Eran. This may mean introducing new processes or platforms. Whatever the team implements, it’s important to make sure the change is lasting. 

“We’re encouraging new behaviors. It’s crucial that this effort doesn’t become a superficial process while the organization falls short in managing expectations and aligning employee performance with broader organizational goals,” Eran said. “The real work is in embedding these behaviors into the culture so they lead to sustained growth and measurable impact.” 

How Does AI Factor into Audits?

Generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) tools can be helpful in maturity audits, as they assist auditors in synthesizing results, identifying missing information, and creating a plan of action. AI may also be another category to audit, Rogers said. HR should understand how AI is being integrated into its functions and the effect of those integrations; it should also assess whether AI is effectively reducing repetitive tasks and enabling HR professionals to operate on a more strategic level. 

HR’s Ongoing Evolution

Maturity audits allow HR departments to achieve greater alignment with their companies’ business goals. These assessments position HR to reach new levels of operational excellence, but not for the sake of change alone. 

Instead, maturity audits are ongoing exercises ensuring HR’s readiness to respond to internal or external conditions impacting the organization. They are not end points but strategic checkpoints on the department’s journey of growth and improvement.