Strategic role of HR

As people become the key competitive advantage the human resource (HR) development function is gaining momentum to play a more strategic role. It goes beyond its mere administrative support function to operations and front line departments

An effective HR strategy becomes equally decisive as the company’s business strategy. In fact, the HR strategy compliments Business strategy and ensures Business reaches its milestones from People capability point of view.

Strategic HR focusses on proactive rather than reactive in its relationships with the other functional areas. It is concerned about what its internal customers need in the future to compete globally. It does its homework, research on the future, and offers proactive solutions and strategic advice. It views employees as strategic resources to be developed to combat future contingencies. It aims to create a working environment conducive for employees to do things right the first time. It aims to prevent mistakes rather than punish them. For organizations to survive and excel in the future, its needs to develop or acquire employees who are multi-skilled, cross-functional, they have to have high emotional intelligence (EQ) and capable of thinking “out of the box” about the future. Strategic HR keeps these employee attributes as its goals while conducting its basic processes of recruitment, training, job rotation, career pathing, and performance appraisal.

It is output driven rather than input oriented. For instance, training results are measured not in terms of training hours or number of trainees per year, but in terms of improvement in the trainee performance attributable to the training. Performance improvement can be in terms of productivity, efficiency, quality of work (defects), customer satisfaction or conversely, number of customer complaints received.

Strategic HR does not abandon these administrative responsibilities. Otherwise, no other department in the company will carry out these “operations-sustaining” activities. But its main task is to participate in corporate strategy.

HR is no longer a backroom or support function. It is in the forefront of corporate strategy, much like sales and marketing. It provides and determines competitiveness to an ever increasing degree. All other things being equal – financial, physical, and product assets – people will make the difference between two competing companies. Strategic HR can make this difference happen!