The Hindu Business Line : HR's boundary with business is now porous

The boundaries of the HR profession along with the other professions in the organisation have finally become porous. This change is making HR a lot more inclusive, understood, integrated and supported. HR will become as much a mainstream profession and function as marketing, operations, finance, sales, distribution and so on.

For years, the HR profession has been an enigma. Those in the profession had a hard time explaining why they existed and those outside it found it difficult to buy the argument!

While over the years the profession has grown in complexity, skill and specialisation, it has always stood alone. HR professionals did not hold out an invitation and those in the business never ever ventured into the HR fortress.

The good news is that all of this is changing in the most dramatic manner and at a speed that we never ever imagined. The boundaries of the HR profession along with the other professions in the organisation have finally become porous. This change is making HR a lot more inclusive, understood, integrated and supported.

A look at some of the symptoms of this change:

Symptoms

Non-HR specialists in HR roles: A large number of HR roles today are handled by people with no specialist HR qualifications. These include people at the highest levels of leadership. The numbers are growing every day. In any HR skills programme, at least 30 per cent of the participants are not HR specialists. Most interestingly, these are not people who have been `parked' in HR because they failed in business, as was the case in the past.

This has made the HR profession a lot more central to the business and less mysterious. Experiencing what it means to manage the profession is helping develop empathy for the function.

Business leaders measured on people dimensions: Those leading businesses today are all measured on key people dimensions. Managing people and worrying about them is no longer only HR's problem.

The process of being measured on people dimensions is making business leaders take shared responsibility for all HR processes and also develop greater understanding of the determinants of people effectiveness.

HR embedded into businesses: HR is no longer being run as a central function, unmindful of the unique needs of each business within an organisation. The business partner role within HR is helping to ensure that each business leader within the organisation has access to the kind of HR support he requires to address his unique needs.

This also means that the business leader needs to develop the capability to give his partner a good brief. The task of providing leadership to the HR professional is requiring the leader to wear the HR professional's hat, at least once in a while.

Reasons

What are the reasons for this shift in HR's positioning and the emerging porous boundaries? There are two key reasons.

Changing nature of capital intensity: A lot has been written about the shifting nature of businesses as observed over the years. The model illustrates the fact that as businesses are moving towards human and intellectual capital intensity, people management is becoming a central part of the business leader's and manager's role. In fact, I dare say that managing people quite often becomes the only source of competitive advantage. In other words, the market place is making the boundary porous. This increased business involvement in HR is quite often seen as a reflection of the poor competence of HR professionals. I do not think that is a fair conclusion.

On the contrary, it reflects the extent to which business leaders are now possessive about the "people piece" of their business strategy and their not wanting to trust HR professionals to partner with them in its execution. How else do you explain that in several of the large organisations where the Chief Human Resources Officer (CHRO) positions are vacant, the CEOs seem quite happy running it on their own? Shortage is certainly not the reason!

Scale and changing job design: The emergence of large organisations in India with over 5,000 employees is now posing a challenge of job design for the HR profession. HR for years was run as a function with many generalists each trying to do many things. Scale calls for urgent and dramatic redesign of these roles to make them more effective.

For one, scale is demanding a far greater level of managerial abilities. There is need for better planning, organising, decision-making, commercial sense and controls. There is need for greater process orientation and accountability for operational HR results.

The professional orientation that HR students receive in business schools does not prepare them for this managerial rigour. Being led to believe that they need to be warm and cosy, they face a rude shock when they are held accountable for results and are measured on key parameters.

This is where operating managers end up doing a much better job. Having been trained to deliver results they adapt to the demands of the job quite well. In response to the changing demands, many of the HR roles are also getting fragmented into smaller pieces. These pieces quite often call for process adherence rather than domain capabilities, thereby making it possible to induct people from outside the HR profession into these roles.

The future

What, then, does the future look like? Will HR professionals lose their jobs and business leaders take over? Will HR get outsourced completely?

Far from all of this! For one, HR will become as much a mainstream profession and function as marketing, operations, finance, sales, distribution and so on. In the coming years, when management graduates get hired on campus, they may be offered HR as one of the possible streams of placement in addition to all the other roles.

The development of a porous boundary will start right here. I see this as a great and exciting possibility. Similarly, the business partner roles will also be funded by a large number of operating managers, given the managerial demands on the role in addition to the need for deep business understanding.

Beyond these developments, I see a large cadre of specialist HR roles, many of which might be multi-disciplinary in nature, calling for specialist skills, certifications and experiences. These would be occupied by HR professionals in addition to people from the field of psychology, education and training, counselling, and so on. The emerging porous boundary of the HR profession is great development and augurs well for both business and HR.

(The author is the founder and CEO of totus consulting, a consulting firm that designs and implements HR systems and process for organisations across diverse industries. He can be reached at ganesh@totusconsulting.com)

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