HR Between Doers And Thinkers

From the old days, people are familiar with the field of investments, trade, engineering, science and education, they are used to perceive those who work in these fields like brokers and dealers, engineers, scientist and teachers as thinkers, problem solvers, creative and developers, on the other hand workers, staff, and employees perceived as doers where they only need to do what they are told and deliver it as it wanted, these concepts and perceptions stayed long enough to be facts and logic to people, in fact it has been taught for generations in this way, these are the heritage that made most of leaders of organization to perceive HR as cost unit, technical function and operations only in other words doers, while the other fields and specialization as expert matters and thinkers.

Time pass and the world start changing and shifting towards globalization and global completion in the market and trades, the demand for knowledge, skills and the right behavior increased by multinational organization to gain the core competency, competitive advantage and sustainability of their business. Recently with the shift from industrial era to knowledge and technology era people start to realize the challenges came along with managing people in terms of conflict, culture, talent, competencies, training and development, employee engagement, performance management and other aspects of human which affect organization performance and competitiveness in the market, thus the realization of human as important assets of the organization increased and HR become more of attention to organization than before.

Organizations realized that in the knowledge and technology era people are the key to succeed, in fact they realized that people were always from the old days the key to succeed but they cannot say it at that time because the environment focusing on materialistic and human used to be seen as part of the production material line rather than important assets and key to success, this shift of thinking transform HR from the perception of doers, cost unit and operation to be human resources, then human capital, these terms shifted not just the perceptions but even the practices that made HR today as a specialized field like other fields were it have expert matters and even the teaching of HR shifted from operation to more strategic and tactics practices like Dave Ulrich model.

Although this is the case in global organizations that face this reality in early stages of the knowledge and technology era still large number of organizations in local and regions are perceive HR as cost unit and operation, they focus on making profit in money and shares term rather than planning to sustain competitiveness, core competency and grow to global market, other organizations still relay on sales people to make them survive the competition and make the profit money, while others relay on financial reports and statistics to make decisions regarding organization vision and mission to craft the strategy, the gap is still there although HR is being now introduce as strategic partner but the old culture and perceptions still strong in many organization culture and leaders mindset, thus the work on pushing HR to take the rightful place in organization is not done and need more convincing for leaders that HR people are thinkers, problem solvers and strategic partner in decision making, this may take a while and lots of effort but it will get there since human today is the essence of organization competitiveness and sustainability.