The Changing Role Of HRM

The challenge of HR managers today is to recognize talent and nurture the same carefully and achieve significant productivity gains over a period of time.

The role of a HR manager is shifting from a protector and screener to the planner and change agent.

HR professionals play a key role in planning and implementing downsizing, restructuring and other cost-cutting activities. They enable a firm to be more responsive to product innovations and technological changes.

Employees are the primary pillars of corporate success. Only people who are involved and thinking can make a difference. Through open communications, proper feedback and fair treatment of all employees’ grievances and discipline matters, HR professionals promote employee commitment at various levels. In such a case employees perform the assigned tasks willingly and enthusiastically and thus offer a competitive advantage to the organization.

Becoming a Partner in Strategy Execution. Strategy is the responsibility of the company’s executive team – of which HR is a member. HR executives should impel and guide serious discussion of how the company should be organized to carry out its strategy.

HR should be held responsible for defining an organizational architecture. In other words, it should identify the underlying model of the company’s way of doing business

Several well-established frameworks can be used in this process:

Jay Galbraith’s star model identifies five essential organizational component:

1. Strategy
2. Structure
3. Rewards
4. Processes
5. People.

The well-known 7-S framework created by McKinsey & Company distinguishes seven components in a company’s architecture:

1. Strategy
2. Structure
3. Systems
4. Staff
5. Style
6. Skills
7. Shared values.

It’s relatively unimportant which framework the HR staff uses to define the company’s architecture, as along as it’s robust. What matters more is that an architecture be articulated explicitly.