Suddenly, and as a result of the dramatic change that is, on a daily basis, happening in the world economy, HR role has become transformational. This department no longer just deals with payroll, training, advert in the media for vacancies, that is, hiring and firing. With the needed tools, HR roles now include; creating a great company narrative, strong company employment branding and inspiring work environment.
The head of HR is now a communication and motivation expert, an analyst and the quintessential collaborator. HR today also plays an appreciable role in igniting innovation, effective organizational culture and strategic marketing leadership.
HR transformational role becomes apparent through employment, that is, attracting the right talents and also using relevant data to provide insight that drives speed and efficiency in the organisation.
Today, we talk about the “Employer Brand”. Everything about a company can be seen and read on a slide. HR brings corporate culture to “life” and guarantees emotional connection through this culture and thereby enables a highly engaged environment. Performance management has also become a critical responsibility and profound impact is achieved through efficient hiring of the right people, promotion, recognition and the various mix of rewards.
HR systems drive high performance by strategically guiding behaviour and ensuring focused delivery of values.
Pattern, a key generic strategy of success in business, is maintained and consistently improved upon by driving people initiatives and value-adding engagement. Company’s balanced scorecard efforts guarantee quality outcomes in growth areas, financial performance, customer satisfaction, consistency and efficiency.
Clearly defined and creative hiring of associates or employees ensures a good fit for the organisation. Orientation programmes are such that the programmes adequately and effectively onboard employees into their roles and job expectations. Performance is managed by evaluating and assessing values through data and metrics. Development goals are achieved through training, both formal and informal.
The HR department must carefully see through reward and recognition programmes so that ideas and initiatives become reality. It must manage diversity to ensure the organisation is free of discrimination, and equity is consistently as well as regularly maintained.
As said earlier, the transformational role of HR unleashes the capacity for creative thinking. Associates must be encouraged and challenged to carefully examine new possibilities and with a mind for progressive innovation challenging the status quo.
An enabling business environment must be built on the foundation of creative thinking. Associates explore and embrace new ideas and the different ways of effective cross-functional collaboration and fruitful exchange of views as well as ideas.
On training, Catherine Courage, an HR expert said “we must transform experience in an incredible way and bring prototypes to life by teaching with stories that connote ideas”. Prototypes encourage and engender experimentation.
In the view of Catherine, and to encourage innovation, we must jettison presentations with “cold” charts, reports and factsheets. We can exchange these materials with packaged stories which capture moods, hearts, emotions and imagination. Associates easily understand and grasp useful experiences from these “live” illustrations.
Creativity must bring ideas to life and thereby refine as well as transform corporate culture. The HR department must therefore, create meeting rooms that provide the “atmosphere” for mental programming and rewiring of brains.
A transformational role that the vibrant HR department must decisively curb is the penchant for associates to turn execution to routine because they are afraid of failure. Employees now feel safe and secure in doing things the way they have been doing them. Catherine Courage points out that “they are trapped in the cycle of micro improvement of incrementalism and missing the opportunity for creative innovation”. Associates must embrace the mindset of experimenting so that ideas can progress from good to better and then, to spectacular. Creating comfort zones shuts off dynamism and innovation.
Imagination and creativity enable boldness, bravery and being always reassuringly colourful, attractive and energetic.
Do you know that when associates are valued, motivated to remain productive and grown or developed intellectually and mentally, they become indispensable in achieving strategic marketing leadership and thereby highly differentiated and unique competitive advantage for the organisation?
The business strategy that guides the achievement of this is the Resource Based Model or the RB model. This model stipulates that the human resource possesses the key characteristics of value, barriers to duplication and appropriability. Appropriability is the ability to securely turn value to added profit.
The RB model enables critical strategic choice when an organisation identifies, recruits and develops the HR asset. This asset is a unique resource that guarantees maximum returns. RB model also unfolds in another business model known as the Strategic Marketing Leadership Model a critical tool for marketing and execution of creative marketing plans.
The components of this model are the primary strategy, competitive role strategy or external analysis and the priority initiative or the coordination strategy.
Coordination strategy is divided into two namely: Self and Internal Analysis. What the coordination strategy basically focuses on, apart from financials and risk management, is differentiation and all-inclusive operations. Well-trained, highly motivated and “up and above” employees go all out to achieve “customers’ efficient management outcomes”.
This “Human operation” stipulates consultative marketing as key strategy for enhanced profitability. Salesmen become consultants and experts who can convincingly and creditably prescribe highly beneficial values for identified needs.
These highly skilled personnel also imbibe negotiation as add-on comparative advantage in the business management process.
A corollary of the above is industry analysis. The goals are to achieve the attractiveness of products or services; understand and fully grasp the dynamics of identifying opportunities and threats; increasing customer needs for valuable/beneficial products or services as well as “convenience” of distribution and affordability.
The RB model in summary, essentially deals with human asset identification and development as a strategic choice and also the deployment as well as protection of this indispensable asset. The HR department has indeed become a critical platform for achieving transformational goals.
