As business executive for years, HR organizations I have come to know have mostly been a support organization, or being treated as such. Traditionally, the HR department is responsible for government labor regulations compliance, company policy enforcement, recruiting, on-boarding, and off-boarding, performance management, employee satisfaction survey, compensation and benefits management, succession management, and perhaps projects that satisfy occasional strategic and tactical needs such as lay-off preparation and execution.
Today’s business war is actually talent war. In today’s post-industrial world where strategic asset to a company means creativity, agility, reputation, and value in the ecosystem in which the company operates. In today’s world, business needs the following to survive and thrive:
- A positive brand in the talent market to attract good people.
- Strategic leadership development program.
- Tactical, easy to access information on staff performance trends and raise awareness and possible remedy of talent mismatch or talent exodus situation.
- A creative labor model that allows maximum creativity and agility in all areas.
- Have a good grasp on employee state of mind to anticipate unnecessary and unwanted turnovers.
- Intelligence on other companies or competitors’ talent situation.
At last, the opportunity for HR departments to shine has arrived; HR is the logical place to lead and guide the organization into fighting shape. But before HR can transform the business, it first needs to transform itself. Be the example for the business. Specifically they should:
- Develop a true customer-centric service mentality. Today too many HR professional are task-oriented. They need to develop themselves into business consultants.
- Morph themselves into an agile HR organization; relegate routine process work to Cloud vendors and outsource partners.
- Recruit people with real business background to become business partners. These BPs can see eye-to-eye with business executives and actually come up with business solutions based on business experience.
- Develop market intelligence using the already strong HR off-line communities. They can help business think outside the box.
- Develop financial KPIs for HR. In business, a dollar saved worth more than a dollar earned. The better you manager your cost proactively, the more the CEO will respect you.
Like any success story, it takes vision and determination for the HR leadership team to think out of the box and transform themselves into a true partner of the business partner. Before earning the respect from business as a strategic partner, HR should take a pro-active role to discover and build the new competencies and tools where they could provide value and information to give the company strategic advantage. There are three major competencies:
- Acquire industry, market and product knowledge. For HR to see itself as a business leader first and foremost they have to understand the money making process of the company, and the external legal, and competitive environment. Stop seeing yourself as an HR functional expert and start seeing yourself as a business expert that has an HR problem. This includes learning how to be a businessman, project manager and a consultant. Take ownership of the problem and be strong and force a solution.
- Learn and embrace technology. Successfully deploy new technologies to automate and streamline routine HR functional activities. work with IT to understand possibilities from technology and data perspective to design and implement new process and tools. For example, a lot of information about competitors and employees can be extracted legally from social media and public data sources. Filtering these data through an HR eye a lot of valuable information that prompts effective actions can be provided to the business.
- Become a good Sales person that pushes solutions, not just an order taker. This includes learn how to put a business case together, learn how to communication on business terms and be convincing as a equal partner of the business. If you had successfully transform yourselves, you will have the credibility and confidence to lead the transform of the organization.
After you read this list you may think to yourself “This is not me.” But like it or not the HR job description was changed when the business environment got severely disrupted. The new normal is here and you are the one that bring that to the rest of the organization.
