Global businesses are surrounded with high uncertainties and fear of recession. I say this because many organisations have prepared themselves based on the past experience and continuously made conscious changes in their strategies to innovate and grow their businesses. Hence, this time the shock of recession is sustained gracefully by many organisations.
Uncertainty and unpreparedness are the only fears and there is no fixed mantra to handle them, so every business has to deal with them in its own way.
In 2012, HR played a major role preparing organisations for change, so that business can grow. Finding new opportunities of hiring and engaging talent, effective utilisation of resources, employee productivity, cost reduction and gearing employees to meet increasing customer expectations have been the responsibilities of HR since long. 2012 also witnessed efforts of HR towards building an employer brand.
I believe, the impact of recession will intensify in 2013 for organisations that are less prepared for change demanded by global economic recession, which is creeping in silently. To make sure that organisations are prepared and equipped to face the challenge, the year could be more challenging, especially for HR professionals.
It is time for HR professionals to be ready, strategise, and establish a plan for the year ahead and the business priorities to predict future course of action.
Priorities for HR professionals in 2013
It is a fact that businesses across the globe are in a state of confustion and uncertainty. The growing uncertainty in businesses is multiplying complexity year on year. This limits us to forecast accurate feasibility of defined trends and priorities for the year ahead. I have always been benefited by the effective implementation of 4Fs in decision-making – Facts and figures, farsightedness, flexibility and friendliness. Hence, during uncertain times in 2013, HR will be more focused on data creation, data mining, data analysis and data research to take calculated risks in decision-making.
Secondly, HR has to be agile in its approach to support flexibility. HR professionals will have to challenge the standard process of following policies and procedures and encourage the organisations to go beyond dogmatic approach. Therefore, agility will be another key for any unpredictable or uncertain environment in future. Speed when attached to flexibility with which HR changes organisational behaviour, will determine the company’s direction of growth. There is a story popular in the corporate world in which, every morning, a lion hunts and chases its prey while the prey runs to save its life. This story will now take a twist, as the key is not only the speed but also the strategy to either catch the prey or escape the hunter with a smarter strategy. Better strategists with greater speed will survive. It will be either a chase to quench our thirst for growth or a run for our survival. Agility will soon be visible in the HR head’s dashboard. Moving forward, agility and alertness in business requirements will play a major role in HR’s success depending upon how HR professionals implement it.
2013 will be successful for the organisations where HR will lead in encouraging and giving confidence to the business development team in exploring different business prepositions with greater flexibility to meet business needs with greater swiftness. Besides, HR will need to make sure the availability of adaptable manpower with desired skills, knowledge, competencies who are willing to perform the assigned tasks from day one of joining the company.
Inter and intra function teamwork will be another success mantra for 2013. HR will have to work in tandem to strategise, encourage, reap and share the rewards from new business opportunities. Similarly, to bind all the functions across organisation will be high on HR agenda.
Going with the learning from previous recession, Indian employees today, especially the ones connected with IT/ITeS companies, are more matured and managing recession with their own independent strategy. Employees can be classified into two broad categories. First, who are highly agile and continue to develop their knowledge, skills and competencies with the changing needs of organisation and industry, and continuously grow within the same organisation or change organisation in a calculated manner. Second, who make continuous shifts from one company to another depending upon the extent of utilisation of their knowledge, skills and competencies. Hence, the definition and formula for calculating employee attrition will change gradually and subject to the loss of resources for which the organisation has work. The voluntary attrition of unutilised resources will soon be considered as an opportunity. Some of the leading IT servicing organisations have already adopted this.
Besides playing the role of business partner, HR will now have to gear up as a strategic thinker and change agent for their organisation. They have to do this with huge thrust on counselling, coaching and mentoring rather than focusing only on training for organisation development. With this change in role, HR leaders will be expected to partner CXOs in defining budgets for people development, establishing employer brand and changing the mindset from nice-to-do to must-do initiatives.
In this unpredictable environment of business, HR has to come out of the mindset of softer aspects of employee satisfaction and measuring attrition rate. 2013 will call for greater focus of HR on making sure that employees remain committed with the organisation’s business objectives by taking corrective and preventive measures to improve employee trust index and ROI on all resources deployed among others. This can be done by bringing greater competitiveness through effective reward and recognition schemes, cost effectiveness, adaptability to change with thrust on building employer brand to attract and retain desired talent and customers.
Let us strategise to take the recession head on to drive global competitive advantage by converting challenges to opportunities. It will be possible only when our learning and development calendar will have programmes that will focus on change management through agility, including establishing processes to use existing repository created by knowledge management as a strategic team.
