Building The HR Department for The Future
Harish Shah
The Speaker who Teleports Audiences into The Future | The Singapore Futurist | Coach Harry
The Age of Innovation has begun without fanfare, announcement or even vocalised acknowledgement, and really, it is the biggest shift yet in human history. The coming decades are about discontinuity, displacement and disruption. As to how organisations can survive, grow and succeed in such a period, the answer lies in how the most important resource, the human one, is managed.
New situations require new approaches. The future is different from the past. The HR of the future, therefore, cannot be what has been in the past. In a world which belongs to companies like Apple, Google, Facebook, Airbnb and Uber, organisational growth and success are for companies that are new in approach and constantly willing to reinvent themselves. And the journey will need to begin with the HR, because it holds the prerogative over the culture and talent that make organisations.
Here is a short list of tips from a Futurist on building the HR Department for the Future.
1. Include a Futurist
Future Studies as a trade function, as best as can be verified from empirical evidence, began in the United States in 1945 at the end of World War II as a direct consequence of that great war, as the US government decided that to prevent such bloodshed again in the human story, the future will need to be studied so that plans can be made as such, where possibilities like those of World War II may be minimised.
Unlike trades and professions like Information Technology that were born much later but grew exponentially in short spurts of time, for various reasons, Future Studies has remained till very recently a profession hardly followed and even hardly heard of. Perhaps aptly, unlike many other professions that came after, the Future Studies field began well ahead of its time. The relevance for it however is ever more apparent, and is only going to increase along with its criticality in the decades ahead.
When business is about navigating changes in time, it is going to be difficult to practically hope for success, when the eye is not objectively, systematically and methodically on the future.
Whether as part of the HR team itself working directly with the Chief Human Resource Officer (or equivalent) without a buffer or as part of a separate functional Foresight or Futurist unit but dedicated to working with the HR department or accessible to the HR department with an interest in HR, a Futurist for inputs would be necessary, quite sensibly, in keeping the HR department relevantly ahead on future competency, talent, development and strategy needs.
We have always thought about the future, imagined the future and dreamt of the future throughout our history. The role of the Futurist however, is to pragmatically study the future with credible methods. And to build a HR department of the future, it is only apt, that having a Futurist on board, is the essential start.
Having a Futurist on-board is a start. It would be redundant or futile however, if the practices remain tied to the past.
The future of work is about constantly answering the question of how to make the money an organisation wants to make in ever changing markets, environments and conditions in the contexts of times after employees are hired to answer those questions. Then again, the history of work pretty much has been that through much of modernity anyway. And yet we look at resumes to determine a person's ability to contribute to a company's future needs based on work done in the past.
While secrets to the future lie in history, you cannot determine the future of storage devices by looking at events of the 17th century. It may not come across as a great example, but basically, the point is, theories cannot universally be applied. Practically, logically, when the world was pretty static in the nature of tasks in and about the midst of the 20th century, the resume may somewhat still have been relevant to determine, that someone who has typed using the typewriter for years, will be able to continue doing the same. That is not how the world functions any more and certainly will not function that way ahead. Even current competencies at time of hire will likely not be the most practical determinants of a candidate's ability to meet the organisation's needs ahead.
What organisations need to do, as has been in academic conversations for at least two decades now, is hire for potential, without the resume. The interview for hiring should be potential based. Training and development, should be based on potential. Appraisal and promotion should be potential based. Most organisations today, are nowhere near embracing such HR approaches. And in the time ahead, this is going to be a problem, manifesting in global economic repercussions.
3. Strategic Function, Not Administrative
The HR person is not or should not be a clerk. The job of a HR person should not be to print and file papers. Yes, predominantly, we've gotten this wrong along the way, for too long, too widely.
Look at the corporate cemetery for the companies that have been buried over the past decade, and you will find telling links between their collapses or failures and the surfacing of the flaw in the current HR approach.
As much as we deny it in talks, articles and conversations, really, HR personnel even today are too widely underutilised in competency mapping, talent mapping, watching labour markets, working on strategies for manpower and over-occupied with taking notes, reporting numbers, filling papers and a whole host of other bureaucratic tasks.
From Branding to Operations, your HR people ought to have an indispensable role in the formulation of core strategies and policies, from the human perspective. For this, you need HR people with dual qualities in each of them to make the department; good at understanding people and good with strategy. Then you need to let them shine with those qualities.
Harish Shah is Singapore's first local born Professional Futurist and a Management Strategy Consultant. He runs Stratserv Consultancy. His areas of consulting include Strategic Foresight, Systems Thinking, Scenario Planning and Organisational Future Proofing.
Graduate of Texas Woman's University
9 年Harish, I may have missed the point, but it seems to me that a futurist in the HR department can help with something essential to developing and keeping a good, highly motivated team: helping team members identify the knowledge, skills and abilities they will likely need in the future to remain relevant, whether to the field they're working in, the company they work with, or the specific job they're doing. We can add value by helping people envision how the work they do is likely to change over the next decade or two. We can then help people find the education or training needed to keep up with evolving requirements. Finally, we can help people decide whether it's better to move vertically or laterally -- whether within an organization, or to another organization. As is, managers in many organizations groom subordinates for higher level positions in the organization. Leaders help people prepare for the futures they desire, whether it's with the organization or elsewhere. We can help managers become good leaders by pointing out how helping team members achieve the futures they desire can help the organization.
Futurist
9 年Harish. Thank you for this, I have long thought that properly managed HR practitioners had a much greater role in corporate strategy than most companies (in fact most HR Directors) recognised. If they do their full job properly then they are in regular contact with employees - who are the greatest source of internal strategic knowledge (though they are not often encouraged to either recognise or act on this)