The group HR director at the Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS) has gone head-to-head with HR consultant Paul Kearns and defended the bank’s policy of not measuring the return on investment on its new multi-million pound business school (Personnel Today, 2 May).
Writing in Personnel Today this week, Kearns, director of HR consultancy PWL, said the bank’s claim that the money it put into the school was an investment in belief was “an untested act of faith”.
“RBS has spent huge sums of money developing HR metrics, and regularly espouses the benefits of HR measurement,” he wrote. “So why, when it comes to developing the bank’s future leaders, does it suddenly dispense with this principle?”
But Neil Roden hit back, insisting that the school – based at RBS’s global headquarters in Gogarburn near Edinburgh – was “a bricks and mortar statement of the group’s commitment to developing the best leaders”.
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“We prefer to consider the school as a crucible of leadership,” he wrote.
In related news, Personnel Today can exclusively reveal that Kearns’ Newbury Index – a league table of how companies perform in relation to human capital management – has signed a partnership agreement with software firm Northgate HR.
