Welcome To The New Era Of Human Resources
The
function of human resources departments has remained the same for over 100
years. That's all about to change.
It
is believed that the first human
resources department was established by The National Cash Register Company in
1901 following a bitter strike. Then referred to as "personnel," the
new department’s role was largely compliance-based, and focused on record
keeping, workplace safety, wage management, and employee grievances.
"A
hundred years later, a lot of organizations are still running HR that same way;
focusing on risk, focusing on compliance, focusing on the transactional side of
it, but there's this whole new era, and things like unions and pensions and
transparency of the workplace have changed," says Jason
Averbook,
CEO of the Marcus Buckingham Company, a Beverly Hills-based
management training and consulting firm.
HR
is at a crossroads, as technology can now accomplish many of those traditional
responsibilities faster, cheaper, and better than before.
According
to Averbook, HR is at a crossroads, as technology can now accomplish many of
those traditional responsibilities faster, cheaper, and better than before.
"It's now moving from transaction to interaction," he said.
Today
there are countless recruiting platforms, onboarding programs, and talent
management systems available to employers, and many, including Averbook, have argued that HR as a
whole will have to quickly adapt or face extinction.
The
New Rules Of Work
"For
many many years people have screamed that we're approaching the death of the
recruiter, the death of the HR function," says Darren Bounds, CEO of Breezy
HR,
an application-tracking platform for small businesses. Bounds adds that Breezy
HR and applications like it can now replace one or two dedicated HR staff
within organizations under 50 employees. "The people who shouted it out
were just a little too early or just being a little bit extreme, but it's been
happening for many years."
While
the writing has been on the wall for some time, many factors that point to this
outcome have only recently come to fruition. Recruiting software has become
more advanced and cost-effective, big data has become a centerpiece of talent
management, and 2015 marks the first year that millennials represent a majority of the American
workforce, a
generation that makes career decisions differently than previous ones.
"It’s a perfect storm," said Bounds, and one that he believes will
lead to drastic changes in the role of human resources departments moving
forward.
"I
think we're approaching a tipping point, but we haven't hit it yet," says
Kathryn Minshew, CEO of The Muse, an online career platform. "I don't
think we'll get to that tipping point until a far greater percentage of
companies out there realize that trying to recruit great people through a really
tired 500-word text-only job posting is probably not the best strategy for
success."
Minshew
believes that this tipping point doesn’t necessarily spell the end of HR, only
an evolution, perhaps even an opportunity.
"Do
I think this wave of technology in the HR recruitment space right now is going
to put a lot of HR and recruitment professionals out of their job? Absolutely
not," she says. "In fact, I think it has the opportunity to be a
renaissance of sorts for the space."
As
recruiting gets more competitive and organizations put further emphasis on
acquiring and retaining top talent, many believe that HR professionals of the
near future will be part of the core management team.
But
the industry has thus far been slow to react to these changes. In a recent
survey by Deloitte, only 22% of respondents said that HR is adapting to the
changing needs of their workforce, and only 20% feel that HR can adequately
plan for the company’s future talent needs. It also predicted that 60% of
enterprise recruitment technology would be replaced in the next 18 months.
The
study, titled "Reinventing HR: An Extreme Makeover," points to some of
the areas where skills need to be improved, such as applying social
technologies to the HR management function, embracing social media for talent
acquisition, enabling greater innovation and customer satisfaction, and
increased knowledge sharing through social technologies.
"Those
are capabilities that many HR organizations have not yet honed," says Art
Mazor, the principal of human capital at Deloitte Consulting, and lead author
of the study. "HR is typically looked toward as the stewards of culture,
but if you don't have those capabilities to bring the culture to a new place,
specifically around innovation and driving customer satisfaction, HR is going
to struggle, and the organization is going to struggle as a result."
The
study also found that 80% of survey respondents believe that their company’s HR
skills are a significant issue, a gap that will need to be accounted for
quickly in order to meet the demands of this new era in HR.
HR
professionals that embrace the opportunities that technology can provide,
however, are able to better allocate their time toward gathering insights
beyond their own four walls, outgrowing the traditional concentration on
internal compliance.
As
an example Mazor points to the evolution of financial management, which grew
from serving basic accounting needs to the CFOs of today, who serve a core
function on leadership teams.
"I
think we're seeing a very similar evolution in another function known as
HR," he says, adding that some companies have already assigned a chief
human resources officer. "If you look at the evolution going back to when
we called HR ‘personnel,’ it's come a long way as a function since then, and I
think now there's a major shift yet again enabled by these tools and
technologies that are finally allowing the HR function to look outside the
tactical, administrative reporting and data gathering to bring insights and
drive business strategy and results."
By Jared
Lindzon
http://www.fastcompany.com/3045829/the-new-rules-of-work/welcome-to-the-new-era-of-human-resources
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