HR serves all categories of employees in all functions vertically and horizontally, and hence the need for integrating their work with other functions does not deserve any special attention. It is only humans, people or employees, who can prepare any organization to face turbulent times. Good HR functionaries can prepare organizations to anticipate and manage turbulent times while continuing to remain agile and excellent. Talent has become the prime currency today and it is increasingly recognized that technology, customer centricity, innovations, money, and markets are all driven by talented people. With “People” and “Talent” in focus across the world, organizations are increasingly resorting to committing their resources to get, retain, and develop talent.
HR is focusing more on talent for the present and future through the delineation of competencies via competency mapping and development of competency frameworks. Most HR managers are getting exposed to competency mapping exercises and competency frameworks to build a competency-focused organization for managing in turbulent times.
HR departments of progressive organizations are increasingly using assessment centers for assessing competencies, identifying and developing future leaders and competent managers, and in turn invest in them. Assessment centers that use multiple methods like management games, simulation exercises, psychometric tests, role plays and Behavior Event Interviews through external assessors, as well as internal assessors, is on the rise. Organizations are now more focused on building leadership and managerial competencies through training programs from institutions like B-schools.
Although today it is quite common to get a 360-degree feedback for the top-level managers and senior executives for gaining insights into leadership and managerial effectiveness, two decades ago, only a selected few attended these leadership development sessions. Now every organization has exposed their top-level managers to externally assisted 360-degree feedback at least once, along with in-house online exercises to receive feedback and develop.
Developing “leadership benches” and leadership development interventions for future readiness and change is another common strategy used by most companies. These initiatives are driven by the CEOs in many cases and CHROs are leading them in the choice of methodologies and expertise.
Employee engagement surveys and surveys like a great place to work are being increasingly used for enhancing human resource utilization and commitment, along with developing coaching competencies of the top-level managers for day-to-day problem-solving. While making corporations competency-focused, the HR has not done enough work to map its own competencies as internal change agents and drivers of change
While the above developments characterize some forward-looking and high-profile corporations in India and the Asia Pacific region, there are many gaps in HR, which, if managed well, will allow HR to be at the forefront of managing change and leading in the VUCA world.
While making corporations competency-focused, the HR has not done enough work to map their own competencies as internal change agents and drivers of change. HR professionals need to do serious exercises to work on the HR competencies that are needed to drive their corporations into the future.
While promoting assessment and development centers to identify high fliers and future leaders, most HR teams and their leaders have done little to get their own talent assessed and competency gaps identified. In fact, in some organizations, HR function is so busy getting other functionaries to identify their KRAs, set goals, and apply Balanced Score Card concepts, that they have rarely identified their own KRAs or carried out their own goal-setting. This results in a lack of empathy for other employees and creates a credibility gap for the HR function. How can HR professional manage to assess the talent gaps of others when they themselves have not experienced or subjected themselves to assessment centers?
Only a few CHROs and HR professionals subject themselves to 360-degree feedback process. Perhaps conducting 360-degree feedback for other line managers has given HR personnel a false sense of power. It is imperative that HR professionals undertake the exercise of anonymous feedback from their internal customers and stakeholders.
While many corporations are doing a great job of developing leadership talent using multiple methods and exposing several functionaries, HR is yet to carve out a good role for themselves and ensure a good ROI on such investments.
Surveys related to employee engagement and a great place to work are considered as tasks to impress the top management with benchmarking ranks. At times, the CEOs are content with the rankings and do little to show concerns for actual utilization of talent and the resultant satisfaction. HR needs to be sincere and should focus inside-out to outside-in in these surveys. These surveys should aim at helping low scorers get engaged for their own good through coaching and self-development programs and not merely a statistic in the surveys. Self-renewal is the key to building capabilities of HR functionaries
HR functionaries have a great role to play in the future; however, they need to build their own capabilities for the same. Self-renewal is the key to the capacity building of HR functionaries. A few forward-looking corporations have undertaken HR audit and other self-renewal exercises to assess and rejuvenate their HRs and facilitated competency building of HR professionals. But organizations need to get their HR systems, strategies, roles, competencies, culture and impact audited, and a renewal plan worked out to rejuvenate HR and reposition it for meeting the future world requirements.
