Emerging HR leaders: ABC of the new age HR

The most important thing to remember about what businesses expect from the people function is that today, people are the most important competitive lever that a company can have. People disrupt industries.People disrupt companies. And it is only people who can innovate and execute strategies. Business plans get the ball rolling. But what really creates sustainable superior performance is the intangible magic of a winning culture – an aligned team and engaged individuals. But who makes this wining culture? Who engages this team? It is the leadership team and the strategic role that HR plays that does the trick! In today’s context, the expectations are different, and HR has to transform to meet the expectations of this new reality.

In this article, we reflect and find out the ‘ABC of the new age people function.’

In this ABC, the ‘A’ stands for ‘Accelerator’, which is the radical shift from just partnering with the business to being an equal stakeholder to achieve business objectives; ‘B’ stands for ‘Bold’, which is the intrinsic need for HR to destroy legacies and for being fearless to innovate in all ambits of people management; and ‘C’ stands for ‘Collaborative’, which is the realization that HR cannot do this level of change alone, and collaboration with the rest of the C-Suite, service providers, experts, other companies and even competitors to raise the talent game in the industry is important. 

When we talk to CEOs and business leaders across industries, we observed an obvious shift in their perception of the HR function. The concept of ‘HR partnering with business is now a passé.’ Today, business leaders do not need partners. They need accelerators and equal stakeholders who will leverage their deep expertise in the art and science of people for accelerating business. The people function has a privileged position here as the HR is the custodian of the most important competitive leverage – people.

One of ways in which HR can accelerate business and create a competitive edge is through recruitment – creating the right positioning in the market as an employer of choice and consequently getting the right talent onboard. The second way is through engagement that is the consequence of culture, development opportunities, quality of management, work environment and systems of appreciation. Engagement is the underlying lever for performance, productivity, and retentionand further creates the constructive loop for superior performance. The third way to accelerate is through analytics, which is the ability to bring predictability and prescriptivity to the people function. At the end of the day, most business problems at the core are people problems; and the people function needs to have the insight and foresight to maximize the right talent decisions for the organization. 

An example of the organization that has outdone is Godrej, the winner of Recruitment Reengineering Category in the People Matters TA Leadership League Awards – the organization who evolved itself in judging aspects like initiative, creativity and problem solving skills of applicants during its campus recruitment process. With an audacious solution, LOUD – Live Out Your Dream, it proposed to give a sponsorship worth Rs 1.5 lakh alongside a non-compulsory summer internship offer to first year college students to help them live their unfulfilled personal dreams and convert their summer interns into full time hires. From innovating on its practices to truly engaging its workforce, Godrej became an organization that maximized its talent decisions and identified the critical parameters that mattered to the organization.

The A for ‘Accelerator‘ defines the new age HR team – one that focuses on business impact, understands the criticality of their role and is credible to significantly lead change and take bold moves. The leap that the people function needs to take to become a true accelerator will require a deep business understanding, the ability to leverage technology and analytics, and a sharp focus on business value creation. 

‘B’ stands for ‘Bold,’ but it extends to ‘innovation’ and ‘disruption’. After the first step of accelerating the business, thinking about how this will be achieved is the second step. In today’s business context, it is about being disruptive, innovative and being bold. Traditionally, HR has been seen as a function that ‘comes to play’ which mainly focuses on activities, programs, SLAs. But today, the HR needs to be a function that ‘comes to win’. 

The HR leaders need to think how their function will contribute to winning. This is a time for bold decisions. A ‘business as usual’ strategy for talent will just not make the cut. This is the time to rewrite the rulebook, and technology once again will be the critical enabler for CHROs in this journey of transformation. 

Being ‘bold’ is the mantra that InMobi adopts in its practices. The winner of the People Matters TA Leadership League Awards in categories Best Practices - Social Hiring and Employer Branding, it created and nurtured a place of innovative culture and adopted bold innovative practices like non-monetary rewards such as foreign vacations and motorbikes for its employees which enabled it to be an employer of choice among many other practices that ‘wow’ its people. 

The final element for the new age people function is ‘Collaboration’. Attempting to cope up with the pace of change today is unlikely to give any desired results. Traditionally, collaborating with external experts, peers and even competitors was not a norm as many organizations keet their CEOs in-house and tried to build their capabilities. But organizations are coming out and together to work jointly on initiatives, where all are winners – for instance in 2015, five companies – American Express, Tata Group, Microsoft, PwC and PepsiCo collaborated for a unique diversity initiative called ReachOut. In this 10-months program, 30 women leaders came together for knowledge sharing on this unique platform, which enabled sharing and learning from each other’s best practices. Another example is the ‘XChange’, a program initiated by 3M,Titan, Cafe Coffee Day, SAP and Bosch where all companies bring their business expertise to craft a leadership development program for HIPOs of the five companies from the consortium. 

In the last two years, we have seen a shift from CHROs just coming together to share best practices and actually entering partnerships and investing equally to experimenting and cooperating in strategic initiatives to move the needle and provide significant impact to business.  

Looking around across all woks of live, it can be safely said that we do live in unprecedented times. This applies to all aspects of life - politics, economics or technology, where unprecedented changes are happening globally and every moment we see something that has not been seen before. With innovation that is disrupting every sphere of life, you would agree that in the next 10 years we are going to see a level of change at work that has not been seen since Industrial Revolution. We have already touched the moment where our jobs are becoming susceptible to automation - already factories have automated production lines and are completely being run exclusively by robots (as in China), and there is a projected software substitution on the way. These are disruptions that are happening and will continue to happen.

But as custodians of the people, HR is at the center of cracking this code. How should it face this attack? Apply the new ABC to get started. 

Here’s the list of Are You In The List Award winners for 2015:

JAY THAKKAR - Head - Compensation & Benefits and HR Operations, Aditya Birla Housing Finance Limited

NEHA SHARMA - Senior Employee Relations Manager, ICICI Bank

AMIT PAPNEJA - Manager-Field Readiness, Asian Paints Ltd.

AVIJIT SHASTRI - Divisional Manager - Channel HR, Commercial Vehicle TATA Motors

NIRANJANA HARIKUMAR - Lead- Learning and Organizational Development, Piramal Group

AANCHAL BHUGRA KOTHARI - Senior HR Business Partner, Reliance Industries Ltd.

SOUMITRA ACHARYA - Head HR Analytics, Mahindra & Mahindra

KUMAR ABHIMANYU - Participant - Career Acceleration Program, Reliance Industries Ltd

ALI IMRAN SYED -Global Learning & Organization Development Manager, Avery Dennison 

RICHA SINGH - Senior HR Officer, HPCL

VARUN TANDON - Associate Consultant, Salto Dee Fe Consulting

BHRIGU JOSHI - Head - Talent Management & Development, MakeMyTrip.com

SHAILY RAMPAL MISRA - Associate General Manager, HCL Technologies Ltd.

ABHINAV IYER - Senior Manager - Leadership & People Sciences, Wipro

BENJAMIN RAJKUMAR - Manager - Leadership Development, Titan Company Ltd 

NEHA SAXENA - Senior HR Business Partner, Adobe.