Amit Kumar (P10066)

The Royal Bank of Scotland Group: The Human Capital Strategy

Problem Description: The RBS group introduced Human Capital Strategy in its quest to make the HR more business centric and have a business partner approach. The focus was to develop a consultancy model, make HR evidence based and to give valuable insights to the managers regarding the workforce practices and its impact on business. In order to fulfil these objectives, Human Capital Toolkit was introduced which was a suite of on-line tools and resources that helped HR professionals across the group diagnose issues, develop interventions, share best practices and measure the effectiveness of their people strategy. The benefits of this tool were conveyed to the managers and this tool was launched in the retail banking operations in the US. The understanding of the tool and its usage has been extremely high in UK and US but its reach is almost 50% in Asia and Europe. The challenge before the HR managers is to increase its understanding and usage across the globe and extend its application and utilization in the commercial and corporate business units. The issue is to find out the best way to approach managers to use the toolkit and increase the utilization so that managers get insights about the human capital and make more informed decisions. Proposed Solution: The HR department needs to adopt the marketing approach to pull the managers towards the application and increase its usage and utilization. This can be done in the following five steps: 1. Awareness The business managers should be informed of the availability of this tool. This can be done by sending mailers to the business unit heads and departmental heads. The more effective way would be to leverage the support of chief executive to draw the attention of the managers to this toolkit. CEO can talk about this toolkit in the morning weekday meetings. The fact that CEO is taking interest would give a strong message to the business managers. Interest In order to raise the interest of the stakeholders the HR managers should drive home the benefits that can be derived from this toolkit. Some of the benefits that will grab the attention of the managers would be the impact of employee engagement on bottomline, finding out improvement areas of subordinates, impact of manager s characteristics on the leadership excellence profile competencies, engagement drivers etc.

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3. Trial Once the interest of the managers is grabbed, they should be given trials of the toolkit. The HR managers should make sure that the application is simplified and tailored to the contextual characteristics of the business as this will help in increasing the utility and hence adoption of the tool. The trial can be targeted to sample users covering the entire spectrum of managerial positions ranging from branch managers, area managers and executives. 4. Adoption if the trial is successfully implemented the business managers will see for themselves the utility of the tool and the impact that it can have on business and will encourage them to adopt the tool. In order to encourage greater utilization the early adopters may be incentivized through public recognition. The success stories can be posted on the employee portal that will encourage the other managers to adopt and utilize the tool.