Twenty years ago this year CRF Institute launched its first Top Employers project. Since then, thousands of evaluations have taken place, documenting the inner working of some of the world’s most successful companies. But in that time CRF founder Sierk Baalbergen and CEO Steven Veenendaal argue it is HR best practice that has changed the most, as they reflect on two decades of research:
“There’s no doubt about it, when Top Employers first launched, HR was very administrative,” recalls Baalbergen. “We knew we were launching something that hadn’t really been seen before, and in 1991 I can’t recall even seeing the title ‘HR director’. We saw HR managers, and heads of HR departments, but the lack of a director really reflected where it sat within organisations.”
According to Baalbergen, HR has never witnessed a ‘big-bang’ moment when all this changed, but through successive projects he says he’s seen HR evolve. Adds Veenendaal: “The acceptance that people were assets on balance sheets; and that there was more than an operational dimension to work, were the ideas that really started to alter things. At the same time demographic changes [outflow of baby boomers and the emergence of Generation X] were becoming more apparent, as were changes to the very idea of the function of work – about it being less about ‘labour’ in the old-fashioned sense of the word, and more about the ‘brain’ and people’s minds.”
The seminal work, says Baalbergen and Veenendaal was the McKinsey & Co’s 1997 article ‘The War for Talent’ – which also coined the same phrase. “It gave the world the wakeup call just as the internet boom really took off.” Baalbergen recalls. “HR became mainstream; it was seen as having the ability to push companies forward. But it also had great responsibility on its shoulders.”
So did HR departments respond? Baalbergen and Veenendaal observe it was also at this time that differences between what good and less good HR looked at started to become apparent, as companies searched for how to respond to the challenge of people growth and business growth.
“We’ve always benchmarked the best,” says Baalbergen, “so we’ve always seen those making change ahead of the curve. However we started seeing territorial differences – such as Anglo-Saxon economies being faster to respond to HR best practice – as well as sectoral differences – such as in professional services, where the people element is more the ‘product’ being sold.”
With the benefit of hindsight, Baalbergen and Veenendaal believe they’ve helped companies be inspired to want to stand out. And in that time too, CRF has also changed – switching from qualitative (interviews of companies) when projects were first launched, to a far more data-driven, numbers-centric approach that companies being reviewed were themselves requesting. “As HR was getting more ROI-aware, so did we,” says Baalbergen. “Companies wanted to know exactly where they stood against competitors.”
He concludes: “Of all the changes in the last 20 years, perhaps this has been the most dramatic. Companies are hungry for data, they want to know they are doing the best HR they possibly can. It’s a change very much for the good.”