diversity,equality and reward management

as commercial needs forces organisations to embrace a diverse workforce, in real world, this often poses a challenge to internal equality values and principles. Often Organisation's capabilities to balance diverse needs without compromising equality values gets tested. HR leaders have a greater role to play in maintaining a broad,pluralistic,integrating policies only to help maintain a ethical internal organisational climate. major flash points are compensation and benefits policies, performance, reward management and power delegations. It is imperative that policies reflect organisational values that upholds equality without discrimination. Equally important is that such policies provide scope to address needs of employees' cultural-country background. What needs to be firmly implemented is to ensure that business drivers need to stay completely un-tainted from employees' race/colour/religion/region/country/language/gender factors. For eg, in C&B, Basic pay need to be delinked from these factors, where as Annual Vacation Travel to Home base or Contributions to Social Security net can be linked to an employee's country of origin. Policies often reflect the maturity level of organisations on these counts, where HR is solely responsible.

Integrated Design for Resource Planning

Once the business context is suitably insulated and interfaced, the next stage ie resource planning and design stage sets in. Organisation Design sequence involves an alignment of the various organisational elements (processes, people, structure, culture, leadership) in relation to the path the organisation is going (direction setting) to deliver the required business results in the marketplace (context). Normally the focus of sequence is on the hr process elements though there is an emerging trend to recognise roles of Finance, Talent and Governance over resource planning and design. The recent trends to evolve more accurate budgeting and forecasting tools towards personnel cost planning has enhanced credibility and quality of HR projections. Also the need to attract, measure, preserve, develop talent and competence has given rise to new measurable scales to assess the efforts of Training and Development. To certain extant this has improved credibility and also opened scope for measuring transfer of learning.

Insulation and Interface Roles of HR

Business Genesis and Community Needs are two major areas that influence industry hr practices. While former is largely driven by commercial interests the latter gets reflected from socio-political framework within which the business need to managed. Even though these areas form a part of boundary management and relies heavily on the stewardship capabilities of leadership positions within an organisation, it often relies on strong functional support from HR leader as well. Organisations need a social insurance cover and to that functional need can be managed only through active support from hr function. Often this gets reflected within the scope of Apex Office HR function and becomes part and parcel of HR Agenda that the HR leader need to manage and carry to the Shareholder. The impact of this function often has far reaching consequences to entire hr chain of actions down below. Notwithstanding above, the emerging trend is to demarcate certain areas under "Corporate Social Responsibility" , CSR, away from hr; more towards Public Relations, Environmental Affairs, Marketing etc. Often the areas covered in CSR relates to Corporate Image , Branding, Corporate Citizenship initiatives and even elements like Environmental issues, Greenhouse Gas norms, Carbon trading etc and in itself it helps greater focus to those areas as well as more time for HR leader for internal HR areas. However such demarcation always demands more financial resources; and not available in vast majority of organisations.

Commercial soul and empathetic needs.

commercial soul dictates that hr stands for business; that the business strategies are paramount as hr stays only if business survives.So we bring in competence assessment, balance score card, goal oriented appraisals, productivity linked incentives, risk based rewards, structured authority levels, evaluated jobs, attractive severance packages. Perhaps organisation management and people management came from a need to organise force to win wars and could easily be transported into commercial and trade wars in the market.
human behavior and eastern spiritualism directs towrads an holistic approach to human capabilities and aspirations of humans from life. Business needs are just an element in that pursuit, and success on human behaviour control, in an organisation context, depends on how well the employee is encouraged to balance the two.
there is undoubtedly a case for professional empathetic social work.

business phase defines hr priorities

business phase impacts hr priorities in a significant way. Priorities during business Inception stages and terminal stages are well known. Not so, during a growth phase, when cash flows are beginning to rise and profits predictable. Chances are one may get caught into unnecessary frills, cosmetics and experiments, with little or no gain. More common are unnecessary participation in environment scanning (surveys/research etc), System modifications, duplication of processes, drift in cost controls, restructuring initiatives, new communication forums, Events etc. Instead at these times, hr can streamline and get more focussed and meaningful to employees' career life and enrichment. Areas like On the Job conveniences,new utility softwares,skill upgradation, cross functional training, improved/latest office equipments, in-house housekeeping and facility infrastructure, avoid overstaffing, encourage vacations, etc .in short stick to business essentials.