With the rapid onset of globalization, business processes within global organizations have experienced immense pressure to go beyond boundaries. One of the first victims of this trend has been the Human Capital Management function. As Corporations move beyond boundaries, the ‘Global Sourcing’ of talent and skills has become paramount to survival and growth as well as the source of competitive advantage. This trend is driving owners of the HR processes towards adopting strategies that transform HR from an ‘operational’ role to a ‘strategic’ role.

HR morphs from Support to Strategic advantage HR staff is being freed from repetitive and mundane administrative tasks to concentrate on human resource development programs that emphasize on employee productivity, performance and retention. Companies are, today, maximizing the value of their most important asset -- employees -- aligning their skills, activities, and incentives with business objectives and strategies. The following illustrates the combination of strategies followed by organizations.

HR organization HR must be able to break down silos and lead integration across the organization. This is leading to more and more HR organisations becoming organized along the lines of business principle focusing on different activities and deliverables. Centre of Excellence: This layer focuses on aligning HR strategy to organizational strategy, catalyst for change management, developing HR policies and reengineering HR practices. Field HR: This layer focuses on People Management services and implementation of HR processes and practices. It also provides business with knowledge support in the area of change management, people development and other HR functions. Service center: This layer is accountable for information and transaction processes and responsible for optimizing processes to maximize efficient and effective service delivery.

Click to view diagram

HR Automation

HR automation is a key element of HR transformation but often misunderstood as the only element. Unless automation is closely aligned to the HR strategy and preceded by restructuring of the HR organization, the investment in HR automation will remain sub-optimal.

Over the last few years, the HR function in corporations has invested a great deal into technology without realizing a significant ROI. A key factor in this is a failure to define functional requirements clearly. By not basing these requirements on a solid HR strategy, organizations spend too much money on ad hoc software purchases or, even worse, under utilize multi-million dollar HR software suites by not implementing modules that could be of significant value. Key stakeholders must have access to accurate, consistent and integrated data which cannot happen unless HR and IT objectives are fully aligned. This successful alignment requires an understanding that changing technology alone will achieve little. This transformation delivers value only when its supported and integrated with other elements of the infrastructure, which are a crucial part of HR strategy. This is imperative to realize important goals of automation - increased efficiency of HR processes and thus, enable employee/ manager self service.

Personalized self services

By using personalized self services- web based transactional tools, employees can self manage their HR information to update their payrolls and benefits selection and skill profiles. MSS or Manager Self Service Systems is a new trend in which managers can carry out administrative tasks surrounding employee payroll changes, job transfers and scheduling of training

HR Portals are the key

Through the use of intuitive web interfaces, companies can use portals to communicate HR information to employees across the company -not just knowledge workers but mobile workers, maintenance, field and ground staff. However, increasingly, portals require integration with packaged or custom applications, such as an ERP, recruiting software, expense management or travel software, etc. As integration with these solutions becomes more seamless, the line where portal standards begin and end will become less clear.

HR Outsourcing

Each organization is now in the process finding the sweet spot on what processes to outsource and what to retain. This has wide implications on HR. HR should be equipped to manage outsourcing - contracting with suppliers, vendor management, oversight of relationship, etc. HR has to identify the required skills and thereby equip other parts of the organization to deal with outsourcing.

Analytics for global HR decisions

Measurement and benchmarking of effectiveness of HR is becoming a key. The top measures are HR customer satisfaction index and impact on business operations in addition to strategic and operational metrics. More emphasis on the metrics that measure value of HR contributions is required

HR Analytics provides the tools for policy development and decision-making. Design, implement, and monitor corporate strategies, analyze workforce data, and continuously evaluate how various scenarios affect business goals. Typically HR Analytics will help gain visibility by providing best-practice methodologies in hiring, training, benefits, and performance analysis, KPI (key performance indicator) benchmarks, metrics and analysis techniques. HR analytics integrates data with other views transforming operational data into powerful and actionable information designed for the agile corporation

Conclusion

HR will continue to face formidable challenges due to change in business conditions, globalization and work force demands. However, significant strides in technology and increased options for outsourcing are giving HR managers specific tools to reinvent their function.

Hence, the keys to a successful transformation will depend on how well the HR leadership will utilize these challenges to create new opportunities for their function.