A car can only run properly if all of its four wheels are working together. This is so true for all successful organizations. ‘Collaboration’ is the key to a workplace success and it could finally determine why businesses fail or efficient employees leave.
For all Human Resource functions, it is no different and ‘Collaboration’ has become the operative word. Over the past decade, Human Resource functions have undergone a rapid transformation from being just in charge of handling recruitment to a strategic business partner. Human Resource is the fine thread that binds together talent management and business leaders to achieve the important objective of business goals.
Gone are the days when HR was all about hiring, onboarding, training, and development and retaining. Today communication and collaboration are core to all HR functions. Effective collaboration and communication help all HR functions to not only attract the best talent but also drive performance by giving the employee a fair idea about career progression. Rapid advancements have been made to the way HR collaborates with all business functions to achieve well-defined targets.
Hiring the right talent has to be a strategic agenda for business heads in an organization. The games have changed and so are the rules. Hiring managers are giving up traditional ways of hiring. Today the focus is on a more socially-driven collaborative working culture. It is no brainer anymore that the success of HR function depends on effective collaboration. While HR can definitely enable business functions in identifying right tools in ensuring cultural fitment, compensation benchmark in salary negotiations, background verification and other related issues, but these can only be derived through an effective collaboration of all stakeholders involved.
Predominantly organizations across sectors would leave the accountability of driving right hiring to HR and hence this has become a core function entrusted to HR. But right from planning compensation, performance management to career development everything involves a successful collaboration of all stakeholders. However, workforce planning could end up being a disaster for any organization if all the stakeholders don’t collaborate with the objective of achieving business goals.
To point out, the following points for critical for successful HR collaborates with business leaders across functions while driving this important people’s agenda:
- Workforce planning: This is an activity that gets decided at the beginning of the year jointly by business and HR considering the projected attrition, business growth, and the overall company performance. While the overall accountability of this exercise lies with HR but they normally collaborate with other business factions and maintain this record of workforce planning. In a nutshell, effective workforce planning will ensure that the right kind of staff is employed for a right cost at the right time. For any organization, people cost to take up the chunk of their entire budget so immaculate planning of workforce will ensure the fiscal health of the organization.
But this a hectic process that that involves a staggering number of inputs from different verticals. It all starts with getting the budgetary input from finance and the headcount for all department. It is then passed on to HR and it is their task to refine the plan. This, in turn, is passed on to other departments like marketing, sales, tech, and product to understand their requirement and work accordingly.
- Creating Manpower Requisition Form (MRF) from time to time: As and when there are hiring requirements the normal process followed is to seek approved MRF and the budget for each such role. During the hiring process once the approved MRF is in place HR kick-starts the research process for the concerned JD.
- Understanding the business need: It has become pertinent for HR functions to understand the business needs for the vertical. Together with the business function, HR can collaborate to decide on the multiple steps of selection and zero down on the assessment techniques based on the complexity involved in a specific role.
- Baselining expectations while hiring: Baselining expectations while hiring for an important position becomes critical. In many cases, we have seen lot many candidates are lined up but selection takes a lot of time because of frequent changes to the JD. It ultimately results in a delay in closing the position and also waste of several man hours. HR has to play a larger role by going back to the business and try to understand why specific candidates are being rejected and what specific competencies are expected from incumbents. This baselining of expectations helps the hiring team in going ahead with clarity as far as the search process is concerned. This would ultimately result in quick hiring turnaround.
- Invest in contemporary interviewing techniques: HR invests a lot of time in training people managers by teaching them the art of interviewing. We are doing something called the Appreciative Enquiry that helps us in assessing cultural fitments of the candidate as against the defined corporate values.
Increasingly it is becoming important for HR and hiring manager to keep a track of where the organization is losing its maximum talent to and where does this talent reside so that right mapping of required competency can be done against the appropriate candidate.
One critical point is that HR teams are excellent in interviewing skills but they don’t understand the nuances of technology, sensibility and the criticalities of the job. So we do workshops for the HR teams in bringing them up to speed so that we can run effective hiring programs with all business verticals.
Amidst all these planning, we generally tend to forget to make things warm for the fresh hires. Post offer rolls out, jointly HR and the departmental manager must make an earnest effort to get in touch with fresh hires and keep them warm. The idea is to keep open ongoing engagement. They must be told the tales about basic organization background and the growth story so that the settling-in period for the new hires is reduced to critical time. That helps a newcomer in feeling welcomes and also help them realize where they are landing.