Human Resources: Administrators or Strategic?

People and Talent Management are becoming increasingly important. The shortage of and increasing demand for skilled workers is putting a focus on Human Resources organizations like never before.  Human Resources are transitioning from a support / transaction oriented function to one that is seen as a strategic part of the organization.

Are you and your Human Resources organization ready for this transformation?

APQC (American Productivity & Quality Center) http://www.apqc.org/ just did a web cast on Strategic Human Resources (Strategic HR) that I found very interesting.  Strategic HR is about human resources having an equal role along with other areas of the business, in developing and executing the strategy that supports the business goals. But to be part of this shift into a strategic position, HR itself has to change.

Traditionally HR has focused on record keeping, compliance, and service administration. These activities are still important and have to be done, but time needs to be freed up for more strategic thinking. By using technology to automate these administrative tasks, HR organizations can free up time to develop into a strategic part of the organization.

One of the points that was brought out by the web cast, was that HR has to transition away from intuition (intuitively who should be hired, intuitively who is a good manager, etc.) to an organization that uses data support their decisions. Being able to use technology to collect and analyze the data to support their decisions is one of the keys to be seen as a strategic part of the organization. On top of which they need to be able to speak the language of the business. HR is not alone in this language requirement, as many departments (e.g. IT, Engineering, Maintenance) all seem to have a separate language from the business language which upper management uses.

For those of you who are interested in the web cast, a record of the webcast can be seen be using the following link http://webmedia.apqc.org/il80web20025/Marketing/Webinars/2014-HCM_JAN-webinar.wmv

SAP’s’ SuccessFactors solution has a number of features that help address these problems. An article in SAP Insider takes an in-depth look at the Headlines feature of SuccessFactors Workforce Analytics, which is an approach to how information is communicated within companies by performing the same steps an analyst performs, yet is automated, scaled across the organization, and made available to managers and leaders in a way that is easy to comprehend. Please use the following link to read the article.  http://sapinsider.wispubs.com/Assets/Articles/2014/January/SPI_Column_SuccessFactors-Workforce-Analytics-Headlines