Question

The need for HR to be a strategic partner to sustain competitive advantage is widely espoused, but appears to be less often enacted. IT, Finance and even Marketing are all facing similar challenges. What is it about these functions that lend themselves to this criticism? Is it deserved, or simply a result of the fact that they are not part of “operations” end of the business? Why?

Answer 1

The role of HR has changed and transformed to great extent and HR today plays the role of employees advocate and strategic partner as well which makes them formulate strategies based on which the organization may benefit. This is an approach that is quite prevalent but the implementation of the same has not been that effective as due to lack of business knowledge and domain knowledge they generally experience quite a lot of challenges as well. I believe that the HR unit in order to be very much effort in needs to have certain business knowledge and therefore the Organizations need to plan to train and develop them based on such requirements.

The role of HR is not to ensure better delivery, instead it needs to ensure that the resources for better delivery are present and therefore they engage employees, take care of the grievances they possess and also make sure that their experience is better so that they are motivated and ready to work for the organization efficiently. As they have to formulate strategies now, they need to be quite sure of what their actions need to be so that they are effective in this tole as well and lack of knowledge of business and operations is a major challenge that the management need to think about and train them or hire individuals from the same background. I believe this will mitigate the issue to some extent.