How many of you work at companies where the leader gives Human Resources (HR) a place at the board identical to that of the CFO?
The tactics HR departments use to recruit and retain employees are always changing. You find at HR the individuals responsible for tackling job applicants, bringing in the most qualified ones and maintaining talent once they are hired.
However, companies today seem to relegate HR to the background, just hanging around other teams, like Accounting or Financial teams. It is not there where they have to be! Human Resources, by all means, should be one of the most potent teams in an organisation. So, why HR does not function as it should, and why it has become so marginalised?
The real problem was they lost their place in the organisation because HR managers become a very powerful manager, building little feuds, deciding on everyone careers, or being easily influenced by others to hire or not someone, or succumbing to the pressure done by bosses of higher ranks, often in a detrimental way. This powerful control provoked that best person abandoned the idea to belong to these complex policies.
So, how company leaders can mend now this dilemma?
It is quite essential to appoint men and women with real stature and credibility to your HR team, who count on a particular kind of hybrid approach: the person who is like a parent acts as a loving and nurturing guide, but bringing personnel to the right track when needed or people who hear faults and complaints without recriminations.
Somehow, these types of individuals characterise for assimilating the business deep-inside, its inner pieces of machinery, history, strains, and the hidden chain of command that exist in people’s minds; mature, confident, integrity and trustful profile to gain the favour of the organisation to become a leader.
The head of HR departments brings a managing experience with a rigorous appraisal-and-assessment system with the character and personality to stands in front of all the personnel. The organisation can track the effectiveness of HR initiatives, helping them to understand if the resources and energy to follow these trends are well used.
HR leaders must achieve two significant roles. They should generate effective-inside instruments, such as training, money, acknowledgement, to motivate and retain employees. And outside tools to manage relationships with unions, to face individuals who are no longer conveying the organisation goals, or those who are causing problems more than adding value to the company.
People in your organisation are your biggest asset, and by all means, HR is a high-impact activity. Executive need to put money and action in getting the best HR manager and let them know they are at the same level of integrity and professionalism as other management. Your firm will benefit from this collaboration and respect within the different team.
However, they also have to find ways to market and brand that experience to a broad external audience that ensure they are building a talent cluster and driving the right people to their organisation to establish their leadership while outperforming the competition.
Barker and Elaine Varelas, managing partner at Keystone Partners, shared four big HR trends for the coming years, and what changes companies can make to keep up.
1. Focus on the right feedback at the right time. Build regular programs to collect and distribute input at critical stages of the employee’s journey, and have the data needed to impact real change. Candidate reaction surveys and ongoing employee feedback can help HR understand how to build an exceptional employee brand and attract, hire and retain top performers.
2. Employer branding will be critical. Nowadays, it seems to be that “candidates are the ones who are interviewing the organisation, because candidates have now access to more data than ever, with platforms like Glassdoor, LinkedIn and Monster," said Barker. It only means that organisations have to update their policies when it comes to talent acquisition.
3. Top-down transparency will become even more critical. "Recognition of the importance of transparency combined with the speed of information sharing – both good and bad – via social media platform has led to HR's ability to influence the C-suite (a corporation's most important senior executives as in CEO, CFO, COO. And to take a highly visible role in setting culture, redirecting and advocating the culture to drive organisational success," Varelas stated.
4. Generational management will mix more than ever. It is the mixture of generations what prevail now into the workforce of any company. Traditionalist, Baby Boomers, Millennials and the GenXers generations bring in their unique point of view, values, and business styles to build a new culture in your enterprise.
The HR department of the future
It is advisable not to do this transformation abruptly, but to start first with the origins, always through feedback and a continuing-clear communication with employees and executives, who will be at the top of the structure of HR strategy, capable of being decision-makers.
HR leaders become architect re-designing your company infrastructure, and creating at the same time, long-term employee’s journey relationship. “Employees today now live in a technology- and data-driven world, and when employers don't offer workplaces and experiences that reflect that world, they will turn elsewhere for employment and career progression."Barket declared.
CONCLUSIONS: As the number of Millennials in the workforce keep growing, and in the other hand, the ageing workforce needs or wants to work longer, enterprises must integrate the different and multiple capabilities and points of views that each generation represents.
Take the best advantages of each one to build a new culture as a result of this mixture, concerning digital mindset, leadership, expertise. HR urgently need to update all its policies to cope with these combinations of generations within its workforce and in this way, to elevate their status as an essential pillar for their firms.
Dave Food
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