Changing landscape of HR

Greetings to all people managers, on the occasion of the National HR Day of Maldives.

When we are celebrating the National HR Day, it is worth giving a thought about the changing landscape of Human Resources Management in organizations.

Gone are the days that Human Resources Management is the responsibility of a small department called the Personnel Department or the Human Resources Department.

When I started working in the hospitality industry almost 25 years ago, we did not have even a HR department in most of the resorts. There was a person with the designation, Liaison Officer, who coordinated the recruitment and termination of employees. Most of the recruitment happened through personal connections and whenever an employee is found misbehaving or not following orders of seniors they are asked to leave. Don’t worry, this was before the introduction of Labour Laws in the country. So there was nothing called, “unfair dismissal” or rather there was no compliance requirements. However, during early 2000s we saw a shift in the Human Resources Management and the resorts and many other companies formed a Human Resources department for the first time.

Forming of HR department was a major relief for the HODs as they saw it a means of passing their responsibilities of taking disciplinary actions to HR Department. Whenever an employee is late for work or breaks a workplace rule, they were immediately asked to report to HR Department, similar to how a teacher will ask a misbehaving student in the class to report to the principal’s office. It was expected that HR Department is there to handle such cases. This was also accepted by those working in HR Department.

This was the role of HR Departments few decades ago. They were responsible for filling vacant positions (not talent acquisition as we see today), taking disciplinary actions and terminating employees. That was pretty much all what Human Resources Departments did until they slowly started few employee engagement activities and staff recognition awards.

Until recently, this has been the role of Human Resources management in many organizations. However specially after the pandemic, the role of Human Resources is being questioned across the world.

The most important question is who is responsible for Human Resources? Is it the HR Department or every people manager?

Many leaders believe today, Human Resources Management has evolved from just few roles mentioned above, to true people management.?And it is the responsibility of every person who have people working under them to manage his/her people.

Yes, People Management is different from Human Resources Management. The first difference is the shift of mindset from seeing people as a resources, like it had being viewed few decades ago, to people as human beings. This shift of mindset of leaders and employees alike, calls for new kind of skills for the people managers.

Some of the key skills for the People managers now include;

-?????????Empathy or ability to think from others perspective.

-?????????Appreciating diversity of thought and treating each member of the team as a unique person.

-?????????Ability to treat people kindly and gently even when they make a mistake.

-?????????Coaching team members.

-?????????collaborating with other departments to solve people issues.

-?????????Adopting a growth mindset and believe no one’s behavior is set in stone, and believing it could be changed.

A senior leader of a Hospitality Company I spoke recently told, actually the legal compliance, or one off-disciplinary actions and terminations could be better handled by outsourcing it to legal and compliance experts, so that their People Managers can concentrate on employee engagement, coaching and personal development of their people. Another resort I recently visited have a no-warning policy, but a caring and coaching policy, as they believe their team members are like a family and in a family, you always advice and guide the children. And this is working very well for them and it has helped them to increase team spirit.

In conclusion, I would say that Human Resources Management as we knew in the past is soon to be history. And some organizations are already re-thinking whether they require Human Resources Departments. This is why many companies have even hired a Chief People Officer in the past couple of years. Also with Artificial Intelligence and new technologies, the administrative tasks of HR Departments will be fully automated soon and Human Resources management will become, management of each and every team member, in their unique way.