The field of human resources (HR) has changed dramatically. Formerly focused on process and administration, HR is now focused on behavioural science and ways to get organizations and individuals to behave in different and more effective ways. American companies are coming to grips with the new role of HR.

In a sense, the HR job is splitting in two. One piece is the administrative, transactional work that is becoming more automated: payroll, compensation & benefits, training and development, and similar activities moving to shared service centres or specialized internal resources. This leaves the other piece, the strategic, organizational development function that is key to helping a company figure out how to get from A to B with respect to talent.

The most effective HR people understand a company’s business strategy and proactively put good systems and people in place to endure that their organization is, from a talent perspective, staffed to cope with today’s fierce business environment. They concentrate on people, building bench strength, coaching and ensuring success. They hold line managers accountable for their performance in the people sense. Many of the traditional functions of HR management (compensation & benefits, training, etc.) are given to somebody with another title or outsourced, freeing HR to focus on the really important business of talent management.

Downsizing has eliminated jobs, but not the work. Jobs are getting harder, people are working harder, vacations are being postponed, merit increases are being reduced, and people are unhappy. At the same time, the Internet has allowed people to market themselves like never before: five years ago Monster had 20 million resumes worldwide, now it has 46 million. The combination of these factors will place talent management and retention firmly as top priorities for HR professionals and CEOs.

A proactive HR person understands these priorities and also that HR has a significant
P & L responsibility, a concept that many people struggle to comprehend. They focus on bringing in the right people and raising the bar for departments in an effective way. Not through mere training and development programs, but through focusing on the company’s objectives, and realizing when people are working out and when they are not. If a company gets HR right, and HR gets the right people in the right jobs, then the positive effectiveness of HR can be measured. Savvy line managers will be able to point at their results and show where HR made a difference.

Over the coming years we will continue to see HR evolve, and HR roles will be exciting ones.

This entry was posted on Thursday, February 23rd, 2006 at 9:12 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.