HR is HR No More!
Perhaps the biggest impact of the digital world is the job of the HR.
From being a role where the profile was simply to hire those that fitted well with the company, offering bananas for every good performance and firing those that didn’t fit well, HR has become what we in OMLogic call as ‘Office Boss’. In smaller companies, this role becomes even more critical due to varied functions that this role encompasses. Specifically in service based startups, HR needs to become the second in command in the company.
Office Boss: A person who is the glue that holds the entire organization together. The role of the HR now expands to the following areas:
- Employee morale: Going around the company and chatting with people. Keeping a pulse on their challenges and boosting them to be more productive and functional.
- Corporate communications: Being responsible for all communications and messaging that goes internally to the employees. HR has the biggest stake into an employee’s outlook.
- Company culture: Being responsible for the culture of the company. Ensuring the values are identified, communicated to everyone and more importantly, ensuring every decision is in consistency with these values and culture.
- Happiness & fun: While the HR team is responsible for conceptualizing and executing events to ensure fun in the company, we believe that happiness goes beyond fun. Its ensuring people enjoy the work they do.
- Creating a complex performance appraisal structure: Performance in the 21st century is not simply pay for performance. Award and reward are not really the same, and lot more people now care for award (both external recognition as well as personal fulfillment) beyond the usual financial and monetary reward.
- Trainings: HR is also responsible for ensuring skill gaps are identified and appropriate trainings are conducted in the company.
- Office admin: HR also needs to ensure the company has the right infrastructure and the right tools available for the employees to function effectively.
- Bench strength: The HR needs to understand the work being done in delivery, have a headlight view into what is coming and ensuring that the company has the bench strength to be able to measure it.
- With all this, of-course, recruit, retain and separate continue to be the roles that HR has to manage. 🙂
We see a lot of startups where marketing or sales or delivery takes part of this role and essentially tilts the balance in the company. HR is supposedly the most unbiased view of the company, much beyond even the CEO who may have a profitability standpoint beyond investor and stakeholder pressure.
