HR Is Not Your Hammer But Your Strategic Partner.

17 February 2017

HR has been known for long time as the bad part of the organization, its where discipline, termination and warning happened to employees, top management and supervisors have been using HR as their hammer on employees which let the HR been perceived by employees as their enemy and executioner, but this is not the top management and supervisors fault alone its also the HR fault that they agree to been perceived in this way by the employees rather than as their partner.

HR has come long way than before where the admin work is only the main thing and major role for HR staff, today HR professional are providing professional work for the organization including the normal admin work, succession planning and management, training need analysis, performance management, talent management, leadership program are all HR programs that lead by HR professional. This fact is so true that today HR has become in many successful organization as strategic partner like finance and marketing where before HR has no place or business to do with top management meetings or discussing strategy of the organization, but today HR is the main role player in the organization strategy, business operation and even finance.

Although HR has been as cost unit and still many organization still treat HR as a cost unit and try to cut their staff short, the program and training and any program related to HR to cut the cost, but at the same time they cannot ignore the fact that HR today is strategic unit that has strategic role in the organization. Organization today mostly the successful ones are not using HR as their hammer anymore or just occasionally when its really necessary and needed, they let the HR to take the strategic role and lead the organization program and support HR staff to perform their duties and responsibilities as they do to the marketing and finance staff, which in return provide them with the best performance and output of the employees and obtain competitive advantage among other competitors.

When you see an organization using HR as a hammer you can immorality conclude that this organization has high turnover, unstable rate of production, high unsatisfied employees and high presser and stressful atmosphere and less creative and productive environment. This kind of organization you can also conclude that HR manager position is always has high turnover in HR manager position as well, since it has high negative aspect that make it hard for a human to continue doing it for long time, the organization will always face problems, crisis, and even bankruptcy if it continued in this path of using HR as a hammer in a world that HR and human become the capital for the organization to successes, business continuity and competitive advantage.

Dave Ulrich quote state the importance of HR "People will change when they see that the change will help them reach their goals. If the CHRO sees that the HR transformation that others desire will help the CHRO reach his or her goals, then there will be more support. Absent this reasoning, the CHRO may go through the motions, but the transformation will not be sincere or lasting."

Mohamed Alzayani

Assoc.CIPD and Assoc.IHRME for human capital development

In 2017 Do We Consider HR a Profession or Career?

In 2017 Do We Consider HR a Profession or Career?

13 February 2017

 

HR has come across a lot of changes, updates, innovation and improvement in concepts, practices and models. We can consider HR as ancient as human with different styles depends on the time and circumstance and environment people dealing with at that time, the shifting and attention HR gain during the past decades came from the urgent understand of how to get the best out of people without making them work themselves out or ending up losing their motivation and positivity to develop and improve to match competition and changes in the environment. Today organization pay more attention to HR role in the organization since it has the main function that import the competencies needed and make the organization work in harmony and provide the main capital (people) with the necessary motivation to keep their positive performance. If we went years aback we can see that HR is a place where anyone and everyone especially those who are not needed or need to be punished work in HR because it was considered as a administration work, today HR is considered to be a strategic function and partner in the organization that’s why experts, competent and gurus people are wanted to be working in HR, but with change a question must be asked do we consider HR a career or profession?

Although this question may be seen as not significant but it does has an important point to be considered. If we looked to the definition of profession we will see many who define it in a way or another but let us take this definition for now "Profession is a an occupation where certain qualities, competencies and level of expertise are known and needed to fill this job". For career we can take this definition for now "An occupation undertaken for a significant period of a person's life and with opportunities for progress". If looked into these two definitions we can see that both are applied to HR today, HR people need very high competencies, experience and certain qualities so they can deliver the service for people on all levels to enable them to provide the organization with the desired result of their performance, this is fact that no one can deny anymore today about the HR people. But which one is considered to be the HR representative in 2017.

In my work in HR an training and development for the last ten years, my humble opinion if you may let me say that both they do not represent HR in 2017, you will ask me how? Well my answer will be because with the fact that acknowledged by organizations today that HR has become a very recognized career and known profession they both become part of the HR package for those who want to be in HR, but since they are both can be obtained, learned and practice by people in my humble opinion I can say that passion is what can represent HR in 2017. Why passion?

Dealing with people today is not like decades ago where they work like slaves or work under the rule of stay survive, people today have knowledge, experience, qualification, professional certification they use technologies and they have their own mind, decision, freedom, labor law that protect their rights and they act an behave different than before because with the environment changes and complicated people adopt and become changed and completed, for that  dealing with people today need to understand who their mind think and work, their values that drive their motives and behaviors, their rules of right and wrong, their personality and so on, by known all this HR people can take the right decision, action and rules regarding motivation, performance management, remuneration, organization culture and other HR service that will bring the best out of the people to serve the organization, by known what make them click HR people can save on the organization a lot of losses, money wasted and time by taking the wrong action to bring the best out of people.

So what does this has to do with passion? When we talk about passion its normally and internal motivation towards doing something which is not very easy to teach, learn or practice, although it might be obtained and adopted or awaken in some people but its easy to get passion people for HR and work on them to take it as a career then profession than do it the other way, this will save lot of work, conflict and it will work out sooner in the end, for example you can have a guru HR professional working for and inexperience HR specialist with passion, you will be surprised that the inexperience will try hard and his best to come out with solution to serve the people in organization even if the law is not supporting it while the guru and professional doesn’t do that, why because of passion and with time the one who will be  consider guru profession is the inexperience specialist that work on serving people and provide the best for them to get them best from them, because he will always work to improve his competencies and expertise to serve the people with quality and humanity as he can.

HR is a continues filed that will never stop surprising us with new advancement, improvement, upgraded and innovative concepts, models and practices as long as human are living on this earth HR will be as well.

Mohamed Alzayani

Assoc.CIPD and Assoc.IHRME for human capital development

Between Knowledge and Talent which is most important to Organization?

Between Knowledge and Talent which is most important to Organization?

04/02/2017

With the growing competition, advance technology, smart customer and globalization organizations are faced with so much in their environment that even a dynamic terminology is not enough to describe it, economic disturbance and fluctuation are getting more and more close than before where every fifty years there is fluctuation now its almost every five years, labour market are getting more and more diversified and scarcity in skills which make organization shifts for low labour market rate and more skills on top of that organization need to cope with the changes happen with the advance technology like e-market, cashless payment and online customers and suppliers all these changes and others are occurring today and faced by organizations which must be lead by the organization leaders and employees using their competitive advantage to continue the business and adopt these changes it heir business. But now this return us back to our question to in this environment do organization need talent or knowledge to face this environment?

First we need to identify each terminology before we answer the question, what do mean by talent and what do mean by knowledge? Talent is "a set of personal characteristics that enhance one’s ability to achieve expertise in an accelerated manner". Knowledge is ""the fact or condition of knowing something with familiarity gained through experience or association". So which one organization needs more to face today competitive and aggressive environment. Although the answer is obvious that organization need both to survive and continue the business but if we think about it which one has the most effect on organization leadership, people management, resources management and business strategy. The answer is knowledge employee, those employees who has the information, know how, expertise and tactics to lead and manage people and resources which talent is one of them. Although talented people has special and rare skills but they do not have the ability to lead and create path so people can follow their steps because their talent is built within its not something can be share or even copy, which the opposite of knowledge that its easy to share, exchange, copy and follow by others which its make it easier to find people ready and able to do the things related to knowledge and mange and lead with the same steps and even develop it with time.

Knowledge employee can update themselves according to the changes in the environment they can upgrade, learn and adopt easily with changes, which is the opposite of talented people that they need time to master and develop their talent, they cant change it according to environment and circumstances, and the organization cant make others to replace them or learn from them or develop what they were doing or creating.

With that saying does that mean talent is not important for organization and knowledge employees are the important one? The answer is defiantly no, talent is very important for organization and its competitive advantage its add value for the organization, what we trying to say is knowledge employees are more likely to be find in labour market and add value for the organization as we stated, but when it comes to talent there are so many aspects need to be considered to acquire it like what is talent for the organization since each organization has its own need and type of talent that can be fit to its business nature, how to identify and measure it, how to make it fit and work for the organization and so on all these aspects need to be addressed when considering talent which its not applied for knowledge employees.

Knowledge is power this is the phrase of today, knowledge economy is another phrase used today to describe the importance of knowledge. In today world who has knowledge he just role the world wither its business or globalization or even cyber business, by putting talent and the other organization resources, people, strategies and leadership in optimum use.

Mohamed Alzayani

Assoc.CIPD and Assoc.IHRME for human capital development