Best Practice Case Studies

Creating the HR Scorecard features ten international, in-depth case studies and ten shorter case reports. Organizations from a cross-section of industries, reveal how they have implemented the HR scorecard, allowing you to benchmark your own organization against best practice within your own industry.

Use the links below to see an abstract from each case study.

Borealis
Union Fenosa
Corus
BC Hydro
Scotiabank
Nextel
US Office of Personnel Management
BP
Verizon
First Union Corporation

Borealis, a manufacturer of polyolefin plastics, has created an HR scorecard that supports the corporate strategy and is focused on performance improvement against best-in-class benchmarks. Within HR itself, country-based HR teams have created their own scorecards. These support both the higher-level HR scorecard and local business unit scorecards. This case study describes why and how the HR scorecards were created and explains how their development benefited from six years of scorecard experience within the Borealis organization.

Headquartered in Madrid, Union Fenosa competes through three major business areas: energy, technology and professional services. Within Union Fenosa the HR function has been transformed from an administrative department into a fully-fledged strategic partner. In this case study, human resources communications manager Antonio Fuertes explains why and how this transformation took place and how HR is helping to create a unified, results-focused culture.

Corus Colors, formed through the merger of British Steel and Koninklijke Hoogovens is using the European Foundation for Quality Management (EFQM) Excellence Model as a framework to assess the performance of the business and its functions, including human resources. In this case study, Total Quality Manager, Ray Wells, explains the benefits of taking this approach to the business generally and to HR specifically.

The HR Community within the Canadian utility company BC Hydro and Power Authority has built a scorecard that delivers to a well-defined, five-pronged customer value statement, fully aligned to the organization-wide strategic objective. Within this case study, HR Scorecard Coordinator Lotte Flint-Petersen explains how the scorecard captures key HR priority areas and how it is helping ensure BC Hydro recruits, retains, develops and competitively compensates the people it needs to deliver to its business goals.

Scotiabank has created a performance management and measurement framework that consists of five key focus areas and ten strategic measures (two for each area). In this case study, Patricia Krajewski, vice-president human resources employee communication, explains how the framework was built and the importance of ensuring the system was business focused.

The training organization within Nextel Communications is implementing a training scorecard to demonstrate the return on investment (ROI) of its training programmes. Comprising five levels, this training scorecard is proving a powerful tool for ensuring that the training organization is focused on delivering to business needs.

The US Office of Personnel Management is working to ensure that human resources management is aligned to strategic goals within Federal Agencies. Accountability team leader, Paul Thompson, explains why human resources management accountability has become a key focus within Federal Agencies, and how they are helping to promote good 'accountability' practices.

BP, one of the world’s largest petroleum and petrochemical groups, has entered an outsourcing partnership with Exult to provide a state of the art HR delivery process on three levels: through an intranet, a service centre and on-site expert advisors. Discover how this pioneering partnership works in practice, and how BP is set to achieve both improvements in HR service delivery and significant HR cost reductions in what is one of the largest HR outsourcing deals in history.

Verizon Communications, the largest provider of wireline and wireless communications in the US, is a recognized exemplary exponent of the HR scorecard methodology. Within this case study, senior HR manager Garrett Walker explains the process by which the HR scorecard was built and implemented. He explains how 17 key questions were articulated to focus scorecard creation onto compelling and strategically critical business imperatives.

Financial services provider First Union Corporation has created an HR scorecard that sets out to show how the function is answering 12 critical questions about its performance. In this case study, HR measurement co-ordinator Paul Lockamy explains that successfully building an HR scorecard was essentially a two-phase project. Lessons learnt in phase 1 helped shape the scorecard creation process for phase 2.