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To be truly effective, your Human Resources specialist must be
the Businessman responsible for Human Resources. He or she differs
from the businessman responsible for Sales and Marketing or the
businessman responsible for General Management only in the skills
he or she has and the skills he or she uses. However, unlike the
Sales and Marketing businessman or the Financial specialist, both
of whom can successfully live their lives and expand their careers
in their chosen discipline, the Human Resources Specialist cannot
hope to be a successful professional unless he is a convincing all-rounder.
If he has not performed roles in, especially operations or plant
management or had bottom line responsibility for a commercial operation,
he cannot expect to be credible to his colleagues.
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Although Human Resources Associations in every country do fine
work in their specific domain and within their geographical boundaries,
they often fail to recognize and advise their budding students and
younger members that to really succeed in Human Resources work,
they must leave this, their chosen career, for at least ten years
in order to follow different paths and to experience different business
disciplines. The Human Resources specialist must swing from branch
to branch of the corporate tree whilst his colleagues climb steadily
upwards or crawl consistently along the same branch.
The responsibility of the Human Resources specialist is to both
manage and advise how to manage the most volatile and expensive
asset of your business. He or she has to be as competent as your
best engineering analyst in ensuring the “machinery” works
in a total quality fashion and that both planned maintenance and
emergency repairs are equally possible. He has to fight to ensure
that these assets are purchased at the right cost, perform satisfactorily,
are well oiled and provide the right quality end product. He has
also to ensure that when their useful life is completed, they are
disposed of in an environmentally friendly fashion.
Companies have not historically regarded the Human Resources function
as a fully-fledged business division and consequently have ill-prepared
the incumbents in such roles. The HR businessman has to be developed
but this is obviously a long-term activity. The primary mover, certainly
in the present development status of the function in Thailand
and its recognition in terms of importance, is the career HR specialist
himself. He or she must really want to be a businessman. They must
force themselves, career wise, into different disciplines. If the
company does not wish to assist in this process, then a change of
company is called for. Perhaps even, for a while, the HR specialist
will have to go into business for himself to understand different
aspects and pressures. The budding HR businessman has to push, push
and push to create the opportunities that will offer the essential
experience.
Companies must begin to recognize their responsibility in offering
support and opportunity to the young Human Resources professional
to develop his or her career outside the more obvious areas of specialism
and qualification and to take a long-term pragmatic view. The short-cuts
many companies take by recruiting a life-long HR specialist and
expecting him to operate meaningfully as a contributor to overall
business strategy or working in advisory roles to the other senior
departmental managers of the company is just as likely to be as
unsuccessful as taking a seasoned and successful Marketing Manager
and putting him in charge of the Human Resources activity. The blinkered
career HR specialist cannot hope to be credible when he attempts
to advise outside the immediate skills he has received in his education
and experience. The seasoned businessman usually does not possess
the techniques, technical skills and people awareness dynamics that
would equip him to perform well in the HR role.
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There are two prime movers charged with the responsibility for
upgrading the awareness and professionalism of the Human Resources
function, the HR professional and his or her company. Together they
must develop a fully-rounded businessman for, unless your HR professional
is “The businessman responsible for Human Resources”,
you have second best and your company will not be performing in
the most efficient way and utilizing its human resources in the
most profitable fashion.
Having reached the situation where the Human Resources professional
is respected as a businessman, it is now essential that he or she
creates within the organization awareness and belief that the Human
Resources Department is a profit centre and not an expense overhead
department clothed in mystique. The HR professional needs to convince
all levels of management that HR policies and activities are major
contributors to the growth and wealth of the company. The HR case
must be presented in dollars or Baht rather than in procedures and
systems. If, for example, a position evaluation structure is being
proposed to the company, it needs to be presented in the light of
how it will improve efficiency, reduce cost or improve profitability.
As a project it should be able to stand stringent financial analysis
just in the same way as when the Engineering department suggests
the purchase of new tooling or machinery and the pay back and efficiency
gains such a purchase would occasion. Human Resources is not a welfare
function employing people to do good deeds, it is in existence to
make money and to add value to the company. There are some difficulties
in measuring the cost of poor morale, of inefficient pay scales
and of high turnover, but given a little latitude, anything can
be measured. No Human Resources policy should be offered to a company
unless it is accompanied by a cost and income analysis to support
it.
Managers have to be convinced that the Human Resources Department
is providing a necessary product and is doing so cost efficiently.
Further, the HR activity must be seen as being of key strategic
importance to the development of every department and to the company
as a whole. It must be seen as a true senior management function,
staffed by high quality personnel who come from an excellent all-round
business experience so that they can talk with authority and implement
with credibility.
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