HRM in the New Millennium

Human Resources have never been more indispensable than today. The competitive forces that we face today will continue to face in the future demanding organizational excellence. In order to achieve this extended quality, organization’s need to focus on learning, quality development, teamwork, and re engineering. These factors are driven by the way organizations implement things and how employees are treated.

1. HR Can Help in Dispensing Organizational Excellence: To achieve this paradigm shift in the organization excellence there is a need for organizations to reform the way in which work is carried out by the Human Resource department. By designing an entirely new role and agenda that results in enriching the organization’s value to customers, investors and employees, HR can help in delivering organizational excellence. This can be carried out by helping line managers and senior mangers in moving planning from

the conference room to the market place and by becoming an expert in the way work is organized and executed. HR should be a representative of the employees and should help the organization in improving its capacity for change. HR will help the organizations in facing the competitive challenges such as globalization, profitability through growth, technology, intellectual capital, and other competitive challenges that the companies are facing while adjusting to uncontrollably challenging changes in business environment. The novel role of HR is to rapidly turn strategy into action; to manage processes intelligently and efficiently; to maximize employee contribution and commitment and to construct favorable conditions for flawless change.

2. Human Resource Should be a Strategy Partner: HR should also become a partner in strategy executions by propelling and directing serious discussions of how the company should be organized to carry out its strategy. Creating the conditions for this discussion involves four steps. First HR need to define an organizational architecture by identifying the company’s way of doing business. Second, HR must be held responsible

for conducting an organizational audit. Third, HR as a strategic partner needs to identify methods for restoring the parts of the organizational architecture that need it. Fourth and finally, HR must take stock of its own work and set clear priorities. In their new role as administrative experts they will need to shed their traditional image and still make sure all routine work for the company is done well.

3. HR Accountability Should be Fixed to Ensure Employee Commitment: HR must be held accountable for ensuring that employees feel committed to the organization and contribute fully. They must take responsibility for orienting and training line management about the importance of high employee morale and how to achieve it. The new HR should be the voice of employees in management discussions. The new role for HR might also involve suggesting that more teams be used on some projects or that employees be given more control over their own work schedules.

4. The New HR Must Become a Change Agent: The new HR must become a change agent, which is building the organization’s capacity to embrace and capitalize on change. Even though they are not primarily responsible for executing change it is the duty of the HR manager to make sure that the organization carries out the changes framed for implementation.

5. Improving the Quality of HR: The most important thing that managers can do to drive the new mandate for HR is to improve the quality of the HR staff itself. Senior executives must get beyond the stereotypes of HR professionals as incompetent support staff and unleash HR’s full potential.

6. Change in Employment Practices: The balance sheet of an organization shows human resource as an expense and not as a Capital. In the information age, it is perceived that the machines can do the work more efficiently than most people however; technology to work is dependent on people. The challenges for Employment Practice in the New Millennium will require that there should be strategic involvement of the people and labour-management partnerships as they both have to take organization ahead.

7. Benchmarking Tool Must be Mastered by HR Professionals: HR professionals must master benchmarking, which is a tool for continuous improvement- directing the human side associated with the strategic path adopted by the organization. Through this, HR department will start appreciating the changes happening within and outside the environment while expanding the knowledge about how to add value to decision making at the highest level of the organization.

8. Aligning Human Resources to Better Meet Strategic Objectives: Too often organizations craft their strategy in a vacuum. Some organizations don’t even include key people during strategy formulation resulting in lacunae between the actual problems and the solutions implemented- as critical inputs are not sought from those individuals who are supposed to implement the new strategies. A past CEO of Sony once said that organizations have access to the same technology and the same information. The difference between any two organizations is the “people”- the human resource. Empowering the workforce is an essential tool for aligning human resources with the achievement of corporate objectives. It is the duty of HR manager to hire talented human resource and to provide them with a positive environment where they will be able to utilize their skills and potentials and to create an environment in which these

individuals are comfortable taking risks.

9. Promote From Within and Invest in Employees: Promoting employees from within sends a powerful message that the organization’s employees are valued. New blood and fresh ideas often come from newcomers to the organization. To avoid stagnation of the firm, new ideas and approaches are critical. Yet to improve employee morale, promoting individuals from within the organization is essential. This communicates that the organization values their employees and invests in their human resources.

10. Review the Recruitment and Selection Process: A key element of human resource planning is ensuring that the supply of appropriate employees (with the right skill mix) is on board when needed. This requires a proactive approach whereby the organization anticipates its needs well in advance. It is important to identify the competencies being sought. That is, the criteria upon which selection decisions are to be made should be decided in advance. A firm must identify those skill sets required by employees to be successful. Charles O’Reilly suggests that companies should hire for attitude (perhaps even more so than technical skills). That is, the fit of the individual with the values of the organization and the culture of the firm should also be considered when selecting employees. This has been referred to as the person- organization fit.

It is no longer enough to simply consider the person’s fit (and technical skill set) with the job. Part of the employee’s fit with the organization should focus on the core values and beliefs of the organization. This will increase employees’ contributions to the overall success of the organization if they already embrace the core values of the organization prior to their selection