Charting a new role as strategic business partners - human resource management

Human resource professionals are at risk. Their future includes dramatically different possibilities: extinction or a dynamic, critical role in their companies' success; assisting corporate leaders in navigating the uncharted waters of the new business reality.

Successful organizations -- today and tomorrow -- must understand and create work environments that reflect the interconnecting, often-conflicting and confusing needs of ever-changing markets, changing workforces with new expectations as well as new work places. Few successful businesses can continue to rely on past policies and practices.

Many HR professionals have become successful by ensuring that proper policies and procedures exist and by advising managers on what they can and cannot do. HR is often perceived as being in the way of progress, kept out of key business decisions and expected to respond to day-to-day crises. Viewing HR as a barrier, some companies are eliminating the function altogether, moving all "people" tasks to managers.

Successful HR professionals must chart roles that include early and active involvement in key strategic business choices. They must become the partners of decision makers, sharing accountability for organizing work -- including where it is performed. Everyone, at every level, must stay focused on shared strategic priorities, challenge old ways and actively promote innovation. The HR professional needs to be a model and take on the specific role of integrating people strategies with business strategies in a way that advances the bottom line.

What is the unique value of the HR professional who earns a place at the table as a strategic partner? By understanding today's workers -- whose needs and expectations range from Generation X to the Boomers -- the HR professional can find ways to balance work and family issues, making both the company and its employees successful. Technology has created endless possibilities for how and where work can be done, creating new issues for HR to resolve. Those include setting compensation for work produced at home and transmitted over the Internet and instilling organizational loyalty and culture when employees are in virtual workplaces and highly sought after by competitors.

HR must also play an active and guiding role in enabling the company to choose its people well, invest in them, support their growth and respect their needs, while fostering innovations needed to achieve the strategic business objectives. This vital role requires competence in coaching leaders in behaviors that will create and sustain a flexible and adaptive workforce, and in innovating at the accelerated rate of change of a global post-industrial economy.

A positive future requires new -- and sometimes conflicting -- roles based on new ways to learn, think, work and behave. Creating new and dynamic policies must be reconciled with a legal framework created for a fading time and place. The challenge for the HR professional in being a leader is to create new options and possibilities -- thinking outside the box and perhaps leaving the traditional organizational box of HR. Talk to your customers and your employees. Together, look at radically different industries and businesses and seek new ways of ensuring support for people in doing their work while the organization competes successfully within the framework of slowly evolving laws.

The HR profession has long taken pride in being adaptive, creative and open to learning. Those qualities are essential to building a world of work for the 21st century that enables the United States to compete globally while offering work opportunities for all who want to work.

COPYRIGHT 1998 Society for Human Resource Management
COPYRIGHT 2004 Gale Group