With the advance in technology, transformation in lifestyle and demographics, and seemingly limitless VC money for start-up companies, competition in all businesses has turned up a notch or two. The traditional battlegrounds of brand, product, geographic presence, have to be augmented by battles of business model, value identification, creative value marketing, alliance channels, and other factors that have yet emerged but is being worked on by well-funded start-ups. This is no longer a theoretical postulation but a real threat to real companies, large and small. Just ask at IBM, HP, Nokia, Blockbuster and Best Buy.
For the most part large global companies have the resources to bide time and hopefully reset their footing. In this new flux-oriented, fast-paced, digital world, the obvious solutions to survival are already expressed in buzzwords such as innovation, change, and reinvent, etc. But in reality how many companies can really transform itself into a really agile, innovative and future-oriented organization?
In order for a large organization to transform into a fit-state that can survive this era of the “Great Disruption,” it needs to proliferate the entire organization with people that are agile, innovative and motivated. They need to have a strategic partner within their organization, whose goal is to know all there is to know about how to maximize and optimize the people power inside the organization. People, after all, are the source of agility, innovation and forward momentum.
We have all experienced it: sometimes in life, you get game changing opportunities from places you least expect. For example, the job you loved might have came from an unexpected area; your soul mate may not be your teenage crush but someone you realize been there all along; the boss who didn’t seem to fond of you turned out to be your biggest supporter at a critical juncture in your career. I am sure you can think more examples.
For almost a century we have been defaulting activities related to employees to a Human “Resource” department or something similar. 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. But in today’s world, how much of these activities can help the company becomes more agile, innovative, and its employees stay enthusiastic?
Today’s business war is actually talent war. While these activities may be necessary for the day-to-day functioning of a company, they are not strategic and do not help win and keep talents for the company. Given that, HR is a huge hidden asset if they can shift their focus from managing processes to managing human emotions.
From a business leader’s perspective, they would want their HR department to:
- Be able to anticipate talent needs from each business. This includes the right kind of leadership skills in different roles and at different locale.
- Proactively identify and manage optimal leadership profile across the company and provide effective communication and education to cultivate leadership skill expectations at all levels.
- Assess and provide optimal staff profile for managers for a certain function, and when the business environment changes provide updates and consultation.
- Proactively provide tactical information on staff performance trend and raise awareness and possible remedy of talent mismatch or talent exodus situation.
- Be able to keep tabs on employee state of mind to anticipate unnecessary and unwanted turnovers.
- Become a secondary authoritative and supportive figure after line or people managers in the company that can connect with employees and inspire long-term loyalty.
- Architect and manage an Employee Circulation program to circumvent potential talent shortage for the company. (Employee Circulation program will be discussed in separate article).
Although the reality is that most HR departments are wrapped up in the day-to-day responsibilities described earlier, HR leaders can opt to take a strategic stance rather than holding on to the processor role. Partnering closely with IT, HR can automate lots of the low value activities and with today’s technology and access to data, the above dream list is completely doable.
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. HR leadership has to be involved during the strategic planning process to provide input on how you can help the business and educates them on people management foresight and techniques.
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. It would be of great value to 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. Also, working closely with IT HR can automate a lot of the standard processes such as hiring, performance management, surveys, compensation and benefits management and succession management, etc.
Think of a company as a person. HR should be the personal trainer that tells the person where and how to build muscles, take the right nutrients and vitamins, so the person can stay strong and continuously evolve.
