Feature

Balancing long-term vision with short-term needs

In their daily struggle to meet immediate needs, HR professionals often fail to have a long-term vision. Renuka Vembu highlights the ways to resolve issues that are concerning today, without impacting the ones that are absolutely essential for tomorrow's business survival

The HR personnel have moved way beyond the traditional role of administration into active participation and involvement in strategic policy formulation and employee career development. However, for them, managing the short-term needs or the daily activities along with the long-term organizational plans and vision remains a tough ask. It is a balancing act which is not easy to master.

Functional responsibilities

Recruitment and joining formalities, training and development, retention and growth, payroll and taxes, maintenance of leave records and personal information, handling issues and grievances, providing value added services for employee welfare thus enhancing the lives of employees—the HR hands are full of these daily chores which take up most of their time. Dharmesh Mistry, VP, Ugam Solutions, said, “Then we have periodic activities like appraisal processes. Daily monitoring, data collection on the basis of employees’ performance, their adherence to deadlines, collating scores, putting them on curves are all appraisal related tasks. So can annual awards or satisfaction surveys which are periodical activities. As an organization, we have a weekly meeting with the HR team wherein the agenda is to discuss the day-to-day operational activities. The monthly meetings would comprise the next step we would take, discussing the actions to be taken in the near future. The bigger meetings would be half-yearly and yearly where we decide the strategies for long-term, including the strategies which we would like to incorporate in the next year.”

Parveen Mittal, Country Manager, Stratify Software India, puts down the areas that he would like his HR team to concentrate more on:

• Building processes for a continuous performance-driven culture. Unfortunately, because of time pressure, performance review becomes a half-yearly activity rather than becoming inherent in a company’s daily operations.
• Pre-empting the emerging issues in team building, compensation, motivation, safety and harassment. Most of the times, a festering HR issue is sending clear vapor trails but not acted upon till it has slowly mutated into a painful concern for individuals as well as companies.
• Work more on improving training quality and team dynamics to get more out of the current team, rather than just focusing on hiring more people.

At GlobalLogic, the HR team is segregated into two groups—one focusing on the strategic jobs and the other handling transactions. Iti Kumar, AVP-HR, GlobalLogic, explained, “Focus of the transactional HR team is to ensure efficient and high quality services to employees while adhering to internal control norms, whereas the strategic HR team focuses more on implementing best practices in the company which are best suited to business needs and are also aligned to the core values of the company. People from this group play a crucial role starting from manpower planning till employee engagement and retention.”  The mission of the HR team in GlobalLogic is to attract, motivate, develop and retain the right fit. The long-term focus of HR is to ensure imbibing core values of the company in all actions of the employees, policies and practices, sustaining an open and transparent culture, attracting the best talent pool from the market, career progression, employee engagement and decision-making and undertaking developmental initiatives.

Need for a balance

Both, the immediate tasks and the future vision, are equally important in their own sphere, and cannot stand independent of each other. It takes focused implementation of the processes and due significance attached by means of time, efforts and resources to pursue in the right track. Dinesh Kumar T K, Assistant Manager, HR, Aspire Systems (India), opined, “The short-term agenda are by all means important activities but if streamlined and defined can be handled by a person who can be very process-oriented. By having a well-defined process and system in place, the HR professionals are free to focus on strategic initiatives. Employees are the differentiators for any company and they are the most important asset. HR should constantly strive to build a strategy to produce the maximum return on that asset and also ensure that they sustain high performance outcomes while also improving the quality of working life.”

Mistry asserted that better short-term management will lead to a situation when you have time to focus on the long-term goals. “There should not be a situation where vital issues are left unattended to. It is about overall managing, more on a level of managerial perspective rather than just HR perspective,” he added.

The inevitable pitfalls

While formulating a policy on paper is no more than just giving the idea a defined mechanism, it is the execution stage that often gets messed up. Working a way out of crisis, managing conflicts, automating the HR functions, training and skill set to match the competency required, proper alignment of vision and strategies, complete management endorsement, are the requisites needed to carry out the action plan effectively and with ease.

HR professionals have to come out of the task mindset and look at things with a consultant mindset. The day-to-day tasks have to be taken care by a well-defined process and system. “HR should acknowledge that the reason for their existence is to create value to all their stakeholders. There will always be a conflict between the attention towards strategic and operational roles. However, at the end of the day, the strategic role has a great impact and creates value to the individuals and the organization,” explained Dinesh Kumar.

Coping up with the changing role

Change is the chain that prompts challenges which pep-up the everyday working life of individuals, negating the ill-effects born out of monotony and boredom. Mistry pointed out that the entire economy has been moving from a production or industrial economy to a knowledge economy. This translates into a need to place more emphasis on people’s growth and being sensitive towards their needs.

Dinesh Kumar added, “They have to become more business savvy. HR should understand how their customers support the organizational business strategy and should constantly strive to ensure that their customers are operating at the optimized levels.” In fact, the outlook of HR should change to play the role of a consultant and facilitator, and ensure that all the managers have the necessary tools to take care of the people. HR should effectively collaborate with all the managers.

Meera Huddar, Director, HR, SupportSoft, believed that some of the long-term activities that the HR department should be focused on include strategic planning for the future, thinking of innovative methods to ensure employee growth in the organization and becoming a close business partner in the organization. “HR managers need to effectively partner with the business and provide neutral, objective and accurate advice to the top management about strategies, people and aspirations. HR needs to effectively ensure employee growth while keeping in mind the organization’s growth and business objectives,” stated Huddar.

HR needs integrate the business focus with its day to day functions and long-term strategic planning—something essential for workforce productivity and organizational development.

renuka.vembu@expressindia.com