A number of employees in the HR Business Partner team at a medium-sized automotive supplier were absent. In addition, the team leader was about to take twelve months' parental leave. In addition, the company had recently been completely paralyzed by a cyber attack and robbed of important data. As a result, the usual tools for day-to-day HR work were missing. The interim manager was commissioned to take on urgent operational tasks as HR Business Partner and also to support the HR teams on their way back to normality.
Shared Service Center: Designing and building the new HR organization
The client was in the process of developing a new target operating model for the HR organization as part of an HR transformation. Two important projects were the development and organizational introduction of a shared service center for administrative HR tasks (interim manager as project support) and the development and organizational introduction of a shared service center for recruitment (interim manager as initiator and project manager). To sharpen the resulting new role of the HR Business Partners, the interim manager initiated and moderated a series of workshops to analyze the interfaces between HR Business Partners, the Centers of Expertise and the Shared Service Centers.
Operative core tasks handled in a difficult environment
The main challenges in this mandate included dealing with unfortunate framework conditions. Due to the cyber attack, the company had to shoulder a large amount of repair work. At the same time, the transformation in the automotive industry (from combustion engines to electromobility) created high cost pressure. In addition, the HR IT was set up accordingly sparingly. In addition, several vacancies arose in HR management functions in the immediate vicinity of the interim manager during the course of the mandate. As a result, the replacement initially overshadowed the strategic project work. This primarily affected the areas of compensation and HR controlling as well as the director function between these team leads and the global HR management. As a result, there was a lack of important impetus for strategic development.
This resulted in a wide range of tasks for the interim manager: from administrative day-to-day business to strategic discussions at a global level. The main tasks were target-oriented recruitment, day-to-day operations and contributing his own specialist expertise and impetus to the company management.
Coaching: Successful development of the HR Business Partner team
The interim manager also acted as a critical and experienced questioner and coach within the HR Business Partner team. The spectrum ranged from individual legal cases and dealing with "difficult" employees and managers to fundamental approaches to more complex issues in areas such as remuneration and remuneration systems (predominantly metal pay scale) and also larger organizational change processes. In the course of the mandate, a total of five vacancies were filled in the HR Business Partner team alone. In addition to operational support, recruitment and induction were therefore ongoing tasks.
All vacancies at management level and in the HR Business Partner team were filled
At the end of the mandate, all vacancies at HR management level and in the HR Business Partner team were filled. The workshops and follow-up work had clearly paved the way for the new collaboration between Centers of Expertise, Shared Service Centers and HR Business Partners and prioritized project agreements pointed the way forward. The mandate ended with a systematic handover of these topics to the team leader after her return from parental leave.
