Is HR As We Know It Dead And Done?
In the words of the Indian HR (human resources) guru Prof. T.V. Rao, "HRD is a process by which the employees of an organisation are helped in a continuous and planned way to acquire or sharpen capabilities required to perform various functions associated with their present or expected future roles; develop their general capabilities as individual and discover and exploit their own inner potential for their own and /or organisational development purposes; develop an organisational culture in which superior-subordinate relationship, teamwork and collaboration among sub-units are strong and contribute to the professional well-being, motivation and pride of employees."
The origin of Indian HR arose from the need to manage skilling, training, motivation and industrial relations with the workforce. Today the HR function’s role is to ‘Attract, Retain, Develop and Engage the best of talent’.
Without much ado, HR and IR are simply ‘orientations’ of the labour/talent market. When labour demand exceeds supply, the issues are appropriately referred to as HR and when supply exceeds demand, the issues are industrial relations.
Irrespective of what we call it, both HR and IR require sound leadership to manage Human Resources. ‘Work classes’ form unions, once their individual bargaining powers get diminished, and relapse back to ‘individual’ bargaining/negotiations when demand for their services is high (an example of pilots in India).
More recently, there has been a growing concern about moonlighting, as clearly there is evidence of demand growth, particularly in the IT industry as we see a growing demand for skilled digital services.
The ABC of Leadership needs to be learnt and adapted to context. Leadership is an Art and a Craft, and in between this is Business.
The HR function has evolved over the decades, to reflect the focus on the emergent needs of business, to take on more interesting titles to remain contemporary within the needs of the enterprise. From HR Director to Chief HR Officer, to Chief People Officer, there has been an existential crisis to remain relevant.
Of particular interest has been the continuous clamour for having ‘a seat at the table’ a.k.a the coveted board position. Well, that’s the scenario the world of HR is in. A state of crisis mode.
If not a board seat, the folks in HR argue for their involvement as a navigator alongside the driver’s seat. A state of an identity crisis. A situation of directionless. To reserve a seat on the Board, the top HR person must know the business of doing business, and the organisation’s business, not just for the current time, but to steer towards the future.
To be a strategic partner of the CEO, one must talk the language of business. The HR person must perform in such a way that the CEO shall not be comfortable making business decisions without consulting her or him.
Business leaders worry about strategy, profitability, customer satisfaction, market share, productivity and business policy, amongst others. In addition, they worry about ever-changing externalities, and the demands of their stakeholders. The vast majority of these leaders recognise the vital importance of people.
They know that recruiting the right people, across the war for Talent, can make a difference and that developing them and holding on to them, is essential for continued enterprise success. But if people are an enterprise’s greatest asset, as the industry keeps saying so often, why is it that so few HR heads sit at the top table?
HR, the missing presence?
Many even argue that HR as a department is not needed anymore. The often-heard quip is that today every reporting manager is a people manager.
To quote Greg Jackson, CEO, Octopus Energy, UK, "there's a tendency for large companies to infantilise their employees and drown creative people in process and bureaucracy… HR departments don't make employees happier or more productive in his experience".
Line managers (reporting managers, as colloquially called), are becoming professionally mature, and have been taking accountability for managing their teams and the aspirations of their teammates.
Concepts of teaming, coaching, mentoring and people development are becoming increasingly more deeply ingrained into their professional responsibilities. People experiences are the responsibility of the People manager (the line manager).
Many progressive organisations have moved the responsibility of ‘people experience’ to their line managers. So what do the HR teams do in these organisations?
HR, the bureaucracy
“We are about rules and policies. This is our manual. This is our culture. This is our mission statement. This is our leadership style. Now you should work, to fit in.’
Most of HR’s shortcomings have been because they stayed away from business issues, preferring to stick with good old familiar administration. Human Resources in most enterprises fail to break out of this narrow objective. To reinvent HR, the discipline has to start by recognising the real need of the enterprise and deleting all unnecessary activities that don’t aid the business.
An essential role of HR is to support the management of boundaries as well – be it at the work environment or between the employees. In times of Industrial Relations problems, functional HR leaders appear ‘heroes’ but when things are calm, employees wonder, ‘what does HR really do?’.
In many organisations, using a restaurant analogy, HR ends up taking a food order (KOT) or serving a buffet. Today employees are increasingly looking at alternate options for advice, instead of seeking out HR. It’s not amiss for employees to think, ‘by acting friendly, they get you to relax and admit things they can use to fire you’.
By doing what the CEO wants, HR is viewed as a ‘lackey’ of management, the feeling being that they are protecting the company, and not the employee. By struggling between the CEO and the employees, HR finds itself between ‘a rock and a hard place’ and is viewed suspiciously as the ‘other’.
The primary role of HR is in setting the people's agenda and leading the transformation, through customised interventions, as required for the organisation to remain relevant. Technological changes, as well as business model shifts, have disrupted the way enterprises seek HR to deliver impact.
With digital transformation, many traditional HR activities have been automated. With rise of startups, the competition now comes from unexpected disrupters. Hence the organisational designs of the past, have to be redesigned to offer agility, scalability and robustness.
An example has been the move from Talent 'Management' to Talent 'Experience'. This helps improve the work and well-being of employees, instead of focusing on the internal needs of HR function. Human Resources can become agile by working closely with businesses and enabling organisational growth.
It can become a trusted partner, by breaking the silos of performance, recognition, compensation, engagement and development and bringing all of this into a single continuum for employees with significant changes such as Work From Anywhere to commute to the office and with Employees today seeking meaningful, rewarding work, on-demand customer service and instant access to information. In general, the HR world is yet to leverage the power of data science to generate actionable insights that create value for the whole organisation.
For better engagement, HR needs to invest in talent, and technology and in building its own capabilities in using data sciences, for handling and proactively solving enterprise issues.
HR 2.0
Of late, we are seeing younger demographics emerge at the workplace. Blend this shift with the overall VUCA world complications we live with. Add to this eclectic mix, the emergence of a larger gig economy and the aspirations of the youth to participate in this. All of this has impacted and forcibly altered the workforce structures.
The conventional control hiérarchies no longer work. It’s the new-age impact and influence mode of leadership. The future organisation will be a fluid hybrid of employees, project teams, distributed teams and individual contributors joining and dismantling for various gigs.
The Covid-19 pandemic has amplified the need for new skills as organisations shift strategy and adapt to new ways of working. Human resources leaders are trying to react, but many are left playing catch-up and falling further behind.
We argue that if the HR function does not modernise its approach to understanding and planning for the future needs of the workforce, it will rapidly become irrelevant within the modern organisation. Human resources have to stop being preventive or about policing the organisation. It has to move from human restraint to human rationale.
Human resources have to move from predominantly compliance, to harnessing creativity. Automation will significantly reduce the number of human employees, because human beings will be needed only to do the tasks that technology can’t do well.
At least for the near future, those tasks will include being creative, imaginative, and innovative; exploring the unknown; engaging in higher-order critical thinking; making decisions in environments with lots of uncertainty and little data, and emotionally connecting in positive ways with other human beings in the collaborative creation and delivery of services and products.
Human Resource’s own look and feel of what constitutes HR, will need redesigning of its thinking, reorganisation of its competency to include data sciences capability, the resurgence of business acceptance of HR as a partner collaborator, and not being a cost centre or administrative function.
This variant of the HR function could emerge only with experienced business managers and leaders shifting to run the HR role, and boards having independent directors with understanding of proactive HR. As long as enterprises have people running any of their business functions, HR 2.0 would be needed as a critical peer.
(As they say, the debate continues. There is no one right answer. There sure would be many relevant perspectives, however differing they could be, from one another.
