Ramanathan V, a result-oriented HR professional brings with him comprehensive HR expertise gained while serving various HR roles in large multinationals and diversified conglomerates.

As they say, “To win the marketplace, you must win the workplace first”. Undoubtedly, when we are concerned about winning a workplace, no one knows better than an agile human resource team.  Generally, we consider employees as the foundation of every successful business, however knitting every employee (irrespective of position) tight in a single thread is something more crucial to achieve common organizational growth. This is where human resources (HR) management enters into the frame, and leads the organization to pinnacle. In simple words, focusing on the organization's most valuable asset its people, HR professionals contribute significantly to an organization's long-term success and sustainability and play a fundamental role in attracting, developing, and retaining talent while fostering a positive work environment.

HRs Driving Value: In Times of Disruption

This rapidly-evolving global business environment is forcing companies to rethink their internal and external customer-delivery models to accelerate transformation and an HR can catalyze such transformation. HR delivers unique value to a firm by delivering three elements:  talent, organization, and leadership. Talent means:  do we have the right people with the right skills in the right places with the right sense of commitment and contribution to win in the market? Organization means: do we have the right culture (or more broadly, capabilities) to win in the market? Leadership means:  do we have the right individual leaders and leadership capabilities to win in the market? HR is not just talent, but also organization. Talent, leadership, and organization would apply to any changing business conditions (disruptive technology, globalization) or business strategy (customer intimacy, product innovation).

The Required Skills for HR Professionals

Being a trusted one for organizations to make key talent decisions and to handle the organization’s most sensitive information isn’t everyone’s cup of tea. Hence, HR management is crucial to any company, and so are the skills required to reach this position. Though the HR profession entails a range of skills, communication and storytelling reside at the heart of the profession. Communicating with stakeholders, the CEO, people leaders, and employees, at different levels of authority and influence, entails different language and tone. This is why the ability to connect well with all kinds of people and leave a professional and positive impression is crucial. The ability to think with clarity and uncluttered is a prerequisite to communicate effectively. Only a clear thinker is an effective communicator.

One of the key expectations of an HR leader is to take the right judgment as their opinion is always sought. To do so, HR professionals must be comfortable with both data-based decisions making and also can see through the shades of grey.

More Tech More Possibilities

HR plays two roles in the digital space. One it helps create digital business strategy and the other it applies digital information from technology to better deliver HR. To do better HR through innovation and to do HR better through efficiency. Next, we have technologies like AI, IoT, big data, cloud computing, and many others which are changing how we work and how we think about and design jobs. HR analytics is accessing and using information to improve HR value creation. HR analytics would have an imprint in a scorecard of HR activities, insights with people data, interventions taken basis insights and ultimately the impact being created through business results.

Wrap-up Thoughts

HR needs to not think, act, or be like traditional HR. They need to understand that their job is about human transformation, not human resources. The big shift is moving away from being a function that exists because of legal reasons to being a function that exists because it's guiding and shaping what the future of work is going to look like. For an HR leader, the best piece of advice I can give is to spend less time on traditional HR stuff and more time looking at change, transformation, the future of work, employee experience, etc.

Hence, a human-first and resource-later approach is a must. After all, nothing is more crucial than the well-being of the most valuable asset of an organization – its employees.