The New Face of HR
With transformation being the prime imperative, many organizations are planning major initiatives to overhaul key elements of their service delivery models, and upgrading leadership capabilities to meet business goals. — BY SIMRAN KAUR BANDAI
“Organizations and HR fraternity largely believes that by hiring the best, by nurturing an engaged environment, it helps us drive innovation.”
There has been a drastic transformation in the way of operation of businesses in the last few years, and, it is expected of the HR function to play an even more critical role in leading and shaping the future. The success stories of the startups are an indicator that disruptive innovations are destroying the old ones, and creating new industries and business models. Cutting edge technology, data analytics and social networks are having a huge impact on communication, collaboration and work. Thus, the way we manage, lead, and organize ourselves is undergoing a radical change.
HR’s role after 2016
The year is a good time to step back and assess whether HR leaders are making the right bets. Though we are nearly through with the year, we still have the time to course-correct. The world economic research looks at the forces disrupting the business models and talent strategies through 2020. The research showed that the HR departments in many companies were dealing with the pre-planning or the aftermath of organizational change. With transformation being the prime imperative, many organizations are planning major initiatives to overhaul key elements of their service delivery models, and upgrading leadership capabilities to meet business goals.
The primary role of HR is NOT to be a people-facing function. So is this is opportune moment to revamp our HR practices and render it functionfacing? In order for HR to thrive and add value in today’s modern world of work, we have to be bold in our thinking, strategies, and the redesign.
The Four Principles of HR
B: Build an irresistible organization with new age tools.
The focus should be to invest heavily on employee engagement and culture. Employees today are more demanding than ever — so the #1 thing that needs to be done, regardless of our role, is to concentrate on building programmes and strategies that make work fun, engaging, and more enjoyable. Making work easy is actually very hard work — but when we trust and focus on our people, the business responds with surprising quickness.
Age-old engagement surveys do not seem to deliver realistic data and drive the business in fruitful and action worthy areas. With the millennial audience in the ambit, newer pulse tools in the form of feedback apps and social networking- a part of their life style, form an essential workforce engagement deliverable. This will lead to more results with limited people and culture team efforts, because it is in trend and frequent and deemed as a part of their living.
O: Own the Leadership Agenda
One of the biggest areas you impact the business is in your ability to help select, coach, and develop leaders .
More than 87% of the companies rate “gaps in their leadership pipeline” as a critical business issue, and the challenges of leadership are a perennial problem.
Today, as millennials make up the largest segment of the workforce, we have to ponder a bottom up approach to leadership. First line leaders, typically making up 40% or more of the leaders in the company are continuously under stress as they learn their new role. If you take the time to coach and develop leaders early in their career, you build brand ambassadors for life.
Facebook, has a business rule “a movement into leadership will not be a promotion.” This simple idea functions is insurance that people who move into team leadership or managerial roles are doing it because they truly want to add value through the success of others. HR has to consistently focus on helping the company identify great leaders and ensuring that the organization comprehends that leadership is a journey, not the destination.
The talent management and talent development market is now redefined with change management agents abilities to lead the transformation building leaner and flatter organizations and using more interactive platforms for learning, analytic driven recruitment vendors and performance management systems that are not only metric driven, are also aligned to the core values of the organization.
“Facebook, has a business rule “a movement into leadership will not be a promotion.” This simple idea functions is insurance that people who move into team leadership or managerial roles are doing it because they truly want to add value through the success of others. HR has to constantly focus on helping the company identify great leaders and ensuring that the organization comprehends that leadership is a journey, not the destination.”
L — Leverage Learning Everywhere
Income inequality and the fast-growing economy have shown that now, more than ever, people are in a mad scramble for skills to aid their professional careers. MOOCs, video learning portals, online learning academies, and learning marketplaces are everywhere. Such disruptive growth in online learning has forced corporate learning departments to catch up ahead .
Today, HR must reinvest in learning and provide engaging, relevant learning experiences and assignments to employees at all levels. Video enabled bite sized learning on digital and android platforms are the need of the hour. Millennials expect developmental assignments and job rotations every year, and, most companies are struggling to redesign their strategies to make this work.
D — Demand data.
Cloud computing and data analytics are catching up accessibility, and, this new area of people analytics is far more serious than “HR Analytics”- an area that has been dealt with in the past. As stated by one of our top HR leaders, we have to “spend time where the money is being made.” Working on data analytic software to generate business driven data is not a fancy choice, but a HR prerogative to be able to lead a transformational role over a transactional one.
We are being asked directly to advice on critical business questions-
● Why some sales teams are outperforming others?
● Why do we lose certain high performers?
● Why do some nursing units or service teams deliver better outcomes?
● Why do some parts of the organization suffer from higher fraud or errors than others?
People analytics is the answer to all these questions, and, that is our bold new charter for the coming years.
This is really an exciting time for the HR profession, with a growing global economy, fiercely competitive recruitment, and a new generation of workers demanding opportunities and changes to the way we work. Learning platforms are becoming more engaging and available anywhere, HRIS is transforming itself into a faster and a detailed information base, and, more importantly, data analytics is changing the era from dashboards to business relevant recommendations. More than ever, this is the time for HR to be bold, reinvent, and lead our organizations into the new world of work.
Simran Kaur is the Strategic HR head in Chandresh Cables Ltd. She carries an experience of 6 plus years. Simran has a Masters Dual Programme Degree in Finance & HR from Gujarat Technological University and a PGDM Executive Program in Strategic Human Resource Management from California State University.
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