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A New Mandate for Human Resources

Group 1 – Abhijeet:Adarsh:Alok:Anurag:Sirish

Executive Summary
The article speaks about four ways in which HR can deliver organisational
excellence. First being partnering with senior and line managers in strategy
execution. Second, it delivers administrative efficiency to ensure that costs are
reduced while the quality is maintained. Third, it helps in increasing employee
contribution. Finally, it acts an agent of continuous transformation. Based on
these points, the line managers must work to completely integrate HR into
company’s real work.

There are five challenges that the companies face in the modern scenario
because of which HR finds an important role. First, increase in globalisation has
pushed the companies to increase their ability to learn, collaborate and manage
diversity, complexity and ambiguity. Second, initially the companies
concentrated on cost cutting measures to increase their efficiency but later on
the focus needs to shift towards revenue growth. They must be market focussed,
develop innovative and creative products and must encourage free flow of
information. Third, there is a need to incorporate technology as a viable,
productive part of the work setting. Fourth, the organisations face a major
challenge in attracting, developing and retaining intellectual capital. Last, the
successful organisations are the ones which adapt themselves quickly to the
changes and which can take rapid decisions and innovate new ways of doing
business.

The challenges described above have moulded new roles for HR. Successful
organisations are the ones which can quickly turn strategy into action, to
manage processes intelligently and efficiently, to maximise employee
contribution and commitment and to create conditions for seamless change.

HR managers should act as full-fledged strategic partners with senior


management and guide serious discussion of how the company should carry out
its strategy. Firstly, it should be held responsible for defining an organisational
architecture. Secondly, it must be accountable for conducting an organisational
audit. Thirdly, HR should identify methods for renovating the parts of the
organisational architecture that need it. Finally, HR must take stock of its own
work and set clear priorities.

HR staff will have to improve the efficiency of both their own function and the
entire organisation. HR work can be improved by lowering the cost and by
removing steps or leveraging technology. HR professionals must be held
accountable for ensuring that employees are engaged and they feel committed
to the organisation and contribute fully. In addition the new HR should be the
employee’s voice in management discussions. It should also offer employees
opportunities for personal and professional growth. HR can play a critical role in
recommending ways to ameliorate morale problems. The new HR has a
responsibility of building the organisation’s capacity to embrace and capitalize
on change.

The hardest and most important challenge facing many companies in this era of
flux is changing their culture. In order to bring about new culture, HR must follow
process of defining and clarifying the concept of culture change, articulating why
culture change is central to business success, defining a process for assessing
the current culture and the desired new culture as well as measuring the gap
between the two and identifying alternate approaches for culture change.

The new mandate for HR requires dramatic changes in how HR professionals


think and behave but more importantly it is required that the senior executives
change what they expect from HR and their behaviour towards the HR staff.
There are four ways in which the senior executives can create an atmosphere
where HR is focussed on outcomes rather than activities. They must demonstrate
that they believe typical HR issues are critical to business success. They can
include HR professionals in strategic discussions and state explicitly that without
the collaboration of HR, strategies are more hopes than realities, promises than
acts, and concepts than results. A company has much better chance of achieving
its goals if senior managers state specifically what they expect from HR and then
track, measure and reward performance. Investing in innovative HR practices is
another way to signal to the organisation that HR is worthy of the companies
money and attention. Finally, the hardest but perhaps the most important thing
seniors managers can do to drive forward the new mandate for HR, is to improve
the quality of the HR staff itself.

HR professionals must focus more on the deliverables of their work to meet the
increased expectations of their organisation. Senior executives need to invest in
HR as if it were a business.

Critical Review
In this article, the author speaks about the role of HR in the modern scenario
which has gained importance and expanded into a multi-dimensional framework.
But if the role of HR is kept stagnant, then the author is in the opinion of
abolishing HR practices. This view of the author can be challenged in a way that
HR’s role which involves some basic things like hiring, firing, rewards and
recognition etc, could not be carried out. HR may not be acting as a strategic
partner in decision making, but its role had never lost relevance.

According to the author, the HR role should be concentrated more on outcomes


than on practices. But the practices shape the organisations’ outcomes. The
process which an organisation undertakes has a lot of relevance to the outcome.
Therefore, this opinion cannot sustain its credibility at all times. There are
several examples which demonstrate that there are disparities between the
functions of HR and the real work of the organisation. This is something which
requires to be set straight first. There were several challenges listed out by the
author which the companies face in the modern era. He also suggested solutions
to meet those challenges.

The author gives examples of companies which have inculcated different ways to
smoothen their HR practices. The advent of technology has helped the HR to
gear up and lower down the costs of the organisation. The opinion of the author
that HR should work closely with the line managers makes sense as the line
managers can specifically guide the HR about the needs. This calls for HR
becoming an integral part of the strategic team of an organisation.

He provided a framework to guide the organisation through the debate and


discussion of the audit process, which is one of the several roles of HR. According
to the author, HR needs to shed their traditional image of rule making policy
police and make sure that all the required routine work in companies is done
well. One of the major roles that HR has to play is of a change agent. To explain
this point he pointed out the example of GE explaining how to guide a
transformation process in a company. The competitiveness which prevails in the
current scenario has brought about a major need for companies to adapt quickly
to changes. The author’s point of HR leading a process to make the changes
explicit rather than deciding on what changes the organisation must go through
goes in line with the previous mentioned challenge. He not only spoke about the
changes in HR policies but also the changes required in the behaviour of the
senior executives towards HR.

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