Soft Skills

HR: sum total of all roles

Continuing his article from last week, Ajay Oberoi explains how the HR performs multifarious roles in an organization

Packaging is essentially the face that interacts and builds perceptions at first sight. It provides the touch and feel. Key requirement is to build assurance of competence and comfort. This comprises of communication, employee support, grievance handling, and creating a happening place.

Now if these are the expectations and the deliverables, then can HR be inferior to any other function in the organization? Rather, HR plays the role that is sum total of the roles played by the CEO, CFO, CIO, CTO, COO, CPO. Let us see this equation and its real meaning i.e. HR= CEO+ CFO+CIO+CTO+COO+CPO.

• CEO: Chief Ethics Officer—create a culture of fairness and transparency; flexibility with precision.
• CFO: Chief Fun Officer—make it the happening place; employee should love to come to office.
• CIO: Chief Integration Officer—integrate people goal to organization goals and develop team spirit.
• CTO: Chief Talent Officer—source, develop and manage talent for current and future needs.
• COO: Chief Opportunity Officer—create opportunity for all employees.
• CPO: Chief Processes Officer—develop processes for higher productivity and people comfort.

Only a comprehensive model can address the complex issues HR faces. HR needs to focus on people to build a competitive organization. It needs to integrate people and processes for business performance for being truly strategic partners in business. In order to be seen as a value-adding and driving function, HR needs to perform various activities like reporting; administration, conceptualizing and operationalizing as a whole and not in isolation. And, for being growth-oriented, HR needs to be guiding and revitalizing through orienting and operationalizing work practices, timely and holistically (at all levels and parts of the business).

There are no shortcuts to organizational success, every department has to work its way up. And the management is too complicated to be reduced into a few steps or things to do. One needs to work one’s way by going back to the basics i.e. being honest, frugal and prepared.

Future of HR

To my mind HR would be called upon to defy the bell curve of standard distribution and would be expected to develop people so that the curve is compressed. Essentially the gap between top and bottom performers will have to be reduced to improve overall productivity. For this, HR would have to build a psychological contract between the employee and the employer and develop durable, sustainable, competitive advantage through people processes.

It would also have to organize people into self-managed teams and decentralize decision-making. HR would be instrumental in building innovative compensation management practices including contingent portion. It would have to propagate and practice sharing of information; share knowledge across organizational boundaries and set the direction for change—by identifying problems critical to the business success, take the proactive role in bringing about change and build commitment to strategic directions.

And to meet these goals, HR professionals with inadequate level of training/expertise will not be adequate. They will have to equip themselves with adequate knowledge and skills in organizational behavior, economics, psychology, statistical analysis and sociology, along with HR practices, apart from having hands-on cross-functional exposure.

(Concluded)

Ajay Oberoi is Executive Vice-president—HR & Admin, Aptech