The Changing Face of the HR Practitioner: Old Wine in New Bottles?

Rosemary Viswananth
Learning Network

A friend put it somewhat laconically in a New Year message: “I guess nothing really
changes just because the year changes”. How true! However with the year 2000
having finally arrived it is perhaps fashionable and not misplaced to take stock of
what has been and what is likely to emerge.
In the arena of understanding organisations and the HR practice in particular, some
things that do not seem to have changed are:
 People work best when they love their work.
 People stay on (voluntarily and happily) in organisations when they have a sense
of learning, growing and being rewarded as individuals and as an organisation.

These continue to remain the core challenges that face both HR professionals and
line managers in organisations of all sizes and hues.

While these core tenets of the relationship between employees and the organisation
have remained unchanged, there have been paradigm shifts in the environments
that organisations operate in – economic, business, social, technological,
environmental and political.

I have tried to capture the essence of these shifts in terms of its impact on
organisation culture, priorities, values, structure and forms:

From To Trends…
Compliance Commitment The shift from systems based on control of
deviance to that which presupposes and
therefore builds commitment. Non-
compliance is not seen as bad, but as an
opportunity to explore, dialogue and learn.
Cloning Community, The shift from defining the elusive perfect
Collective employee and seeing organisations as a
Contradictions collection of individuals towards genuinely
Creativity caring about the collective. This would
mean the willingness to live with and value
differences, even contradictions. Diversity
moves from tokenism to providing the
creative advantage.
Contribution Creation The trend moves from painstaking and
detailed measures of individual
performance to also understand it in the
context of creating the whole or the bigger
picture. The challenge here is to establish
the connection between the part and the
whole – however small or insignificant the
part may seem.
Contract Covenant Employment moves from being legal
contracts in which both parties try to protect
oneself from the other, to agreements
 based on trust, willingness to give of one’s
skills, knowledge, and heart.
Control - Consultation Policies, rules, norms and even results are
being in worked through in more open and
Charge consultative ways. Information is accessible
to all – challenging the earlier “need to know “
norm. Open book systems. Technology leaps
also make these viable and efficient
processes. Self-managing systems replace
supervisory controls.
Credentials Competencies Hiring is moving away from the credentials
model to a competency-based approach.
Building skills and coaching will become as
important as deploying or using skills.
Compensation Celebration Compensation as a dispensation of those
in authority, to more participative ways of
arriving at compensation or where
compensation/rewards is decided by the
work teams themselves. Egalitarian,
transparent and equitable systems replace
hierarchical ones. Already, compensation in
the fast changing IT & Knowledge industry
is increasing employee centered focusing
on flexibility and lifestyle choices rather
than merely monthly take-home pay
packages.
And of course While organizations have always had to
the mother of grapple with managing change – the pace,
all C’s - complexity of change and the
Managing consequences of not responding to (and
Change! sometimes even reading) the writing on the
wall are far more immediate and of
immense consequence. In the IT industry in
particular, the ability or otherwise to
foresee and strategically respond to
change may make or break organizations.

Many of these shifts are in evidence already and we will see their bolder and more
assertive presence in the future.
This begs the question then, of what kind of skills, roles and competencies are
required of HR professionals to steer these changes.
If HR professionals believe that their key role is to help organisations make the
paradigm shifts described above… the set of competencies would have to include
the following critical items:
 Active listening skills
 Encouraging and facilitating dialogue.
 Designing and nurturing collective processes
 Encouraging and working with rather than suppressing and wishing away
differences.
 Understanding the dynamics, diagnosing and making interventions in both small
and large groups.
 Willing to value and learn from one’s own and other’s experience.
 Believe in decentralizing, power sharing and autonomy.
 Trusting individual's capacity and interest in their own and the organization’s
growth.
 Personal honesty and courage.


These certainly are different from the skills more traditionally associated with HR:
problem solving, conflict management, counseling, compensation and benefits
design, recruitment, and HRIS where the key skill is to fix things rather than open
them up!

With the paradigm shift essentially being of moving from focus on individual and
team performance / results to crafting organizational and collective learning
processes these are competencies that not just HR practitioners but leaders and
mangers of future organizations would demonstrate.

Published in the special supplement of Ascent , Times of India February 2000Can

we do away with all that is below!