Whenever someone tells me, “But this is global HR best practice,” I am tempted to ask:

Best practice for whom?

For which industry? Which country? Which workforce? Which culture? Which labour market? Which business strategy?

A people practice that works brilliantly for a technology company in Silicon Valley may not automatically be right for a bank in Accra, a manufacturing company in Lagos or a growing SME in Nairobi.

Yet HR has become rather good at benchmarking, importing and implementing what admired organisations do.

Sometimes we call that strategy.

It isn't.

Learning from best practice is important. Blindly copying it is not.

The CIPD makes an important point in its guidance on strategic HRM: there is no single HR strategy that will deliver success in every situation. Organisations need approaches that reflect their own context, culture and objectives.

CIPD: Strategic Human Resource Management

Consider performance management. One organisation abolishes ratings and flourishes because managers are skilled at giving feedback, performance expectations are clear and trust is high. Another copies the practice, but its managers avoid difficult conversations, employees distrust pay decisions and performance standards are vague.

Same practice.

Different context.

Different result.

The problem is not always the practice. Sometimes it is the fit.

Best Practice Asks

Best Fit Asks

What are leading organisations doing?

What does our business need?

How do we replicate it?

What should we adapt?

Is it modern HR?

Does it solve our problem?

Did we implement it?

Did performance improve?

This distinction matters enormously in Africa.

PwC's Africa Workforce Hopes and Fears Survey 2025 found that 64% of African workers surveyed had used AI at work in the previous year, compared with 54% globally. Yet only 35% believed that more than half of their current skills would still be relevant three years later.

Our workplaces are changing quickly, but Africa itself is not one HR context.

What works in Ghana may need adaptation in Kenya. What works in banking may fail in agriculture. What a multinational needs may bury an SME under unnecessary complexity.

And please, let us not confuse localisation with lowering standards.

Best fit is actually harder than best practice.

It requires HR to understand the business before prescribing the solution. It means examining strategy, workforce data, managerial capability, culture and the labour market, then deciding what to adopt, what to adapt and what to reject.

That is professional judgement.

And it is central to the HR Architecture conversation I have been exploring:

Strategy → Structure → Skills → Systems → Leadership → Culture → Performance

We start with the business and design backwards from what it needs to achieve. We do not start with somebody else's HR model and squeeze our organisation into it.

“Best practice tells you what worked somewhere else. Strategy asks what will work here.”
Margaret Jackson

African HR professionals should absolutely learn globally.

But we must also have the confidence to diagnose locally and design intelligently.

Because global does not mean universal.

And perhaps it is time we replaced one of HR's favourite questions, “What is best practice?”, with a better one:

“What is the best fit for the business we are trying to build?”

Learn globally. Diagnose locally. Design deliberately.

That is how HR stops copying and starts architecting.