 |
 HOW THE NEW WORKPLACE WILL CHANGE HR
As the new conditions under which people work change, the services and the tools they need change too. New kinds of work demand new kinds of training. They lead to new kinds of compensation—witness the rise of stock options. They require an organization to re-organize and then (before anyone is quite settled) to reorganize again. OD, which grew up in a period of occasional big changes, suddenly finds itself trying to help organizations deal with constant change. And in times of constant change, anything that makes the organization less flexible is a debit. Traditional jobs are relatively inflexible, so maybe job-descriptions have to go. All sorts of areas that HR once considered its province are threatened.
Take recruiting—an HR function if there ever was one. What happens to HR-based recruiting when a dozen different web sites not only facilitate new ways of hiring but actually move control of that function within the reach of individual managers and team leaders? In an article summarizing the impact of these new online services on organizations, Britton Manasco has suggested that:
one thing is for sure. The corporate role of HR departments is about to radically change—or be obliterated... What seems most evident is that activities that once were managed by HR professionals...will now become the responsibility of other people throughout the enterprise. (12)
HR, in other words, is getting "disintermediated" just as many other parts of the traditional economy have been.
What is HR to do? Well, first, the precise outcomes of the disintermediation process are anyone's guess right now. So, HR needs to get itself a new strategy to capitalize on the kind of change that is going on, rather than trying to guess what its outcomes will be. The strategy must enable it to profit from the fact of change instead of being disrupted by it.
Here is a suggestion: the HR department should start thinking of itself as if it were an independent professional service firm. It needs to study its "customers" within the organization with the same care that a start-up firm studies its market. And it needs to develop the flexibility and responsiveness that is natural to a successful small start-up. That means that in HR, "jobs" are likely to become (if they are not already) seriously dysfunctional. HR people, both specialists and generalists, are going to have to operate like a team of free agents put together to take care of a customer's human issues.
Will the new workplace change HR? You bet.
12 See Britton Manasco, "Workforce Solutions Transform Recruitment," Knowledge Inc: The Executive Report on Knowledge, Technology, and Performance [A newsletter published in Austin TX], October/November, 1999, pp. 1ff.
From Organizations In Transition, Vol 13. #2
|
