Vinayshil Gautam
The function of a Human Resources Department in any organisation is a complex and indispensable one. It deals with recruitment, promotion, retirement. The list is incomplete because it also deals with manpower allocation, manpower planning, manpower skilling and more.
It may not be widely recognised or accepted yet, but one of the biggest failings of Indian organisations is that a very large number of human resource functions are headed by people who have moved in laterally from some other unrelated function; for instance, finance, manufacturing etc. The engineer, the auditor, the scientist, the financial expert or just about any other functional person can move in as the head of HR with no greater credentials than that person’s desire to do so and the acceptance of the-power-that-be of this desire. The result is disastrous. It is often at the cost of avoidable turbulence, turnover or worse.
If the aberration were to stop at the level of filling up of the top position, it would be bad enough. But it is made worse. Very often, people lower down in the HR cadre have no better experience in HR than the top person. The inherent organisational chaos which then ensues can and does land on the desk of the chief executive officer.
A simple proposition, that HR is also a specialisation, does not seem to have sufficient operational acceptance, as would have been expected. The significance of HR is indeed far more fundamental in many other ways. It has to do with tradition, culture, and modernisation. Consider the situation where the concept of role, performance and presentation, not to talk of emotional orientation gets influenced by culture. There is talk of technology and even ideology – which is all to the good, but culture becomes everyone’s claimed forte.
The narrative continues in the shape of industrial relations. Torn between different values, the manager and the worker separately in their work roles display a syndrome which is often marked with feuds. Productivity gets culturally determined.
In an environment where the brands of Harvard, Yale, Princeton and others of that category spell ‘magic’, even the thought of indigenisation is open to ridicule. Consider the defining characteristics of the Economic Advisor to the Government of India which were recently explored to identify the incumbent by a government pledged to indigenisation. They got the same type of person as their predecessor government would have done.
The Achilles heel of the present government may well turn out to be its inability to postulate any alternate model of development. The preceding government was brazenly American-Euro centric. Even political leaders who had emerged from the grassroots, ended up attempting to ape the social characteristics of the American-European-bred community leaders. Consider the way in which they struggled to refine their English and celebrate their birthday!
Not enough has changed with the coming in of the new Government, at least in this dimension. The same is true of work organisations or industrial organisations – and the composition of the HR is an indication.
What is needed is thought-leadership and the ability to generate alternate models and choose therefrom. Be it at the level of nation-building, models of development, choices of planning methods or ways of running the industry (of which HR would hold the key) – every activity would benefit from this methodology.
Alternate models abound everywhere. There is no such thing as a unified Western model either. The Scandinavian experience with socio-cultural variable in work organisations is very different from the British approach to industrialisation and urbanisation. The two, in many ways, differ from the route which Bismarckian-Germany took. The US example is also different.
The need is to recognise that for things to fundamentally change, one has to have credible and operational models available to choose from. Human resource departments in organisations can serve as a mini-lab of development. Like human resources, the ability to generate options is a strategic specialisation. We need people who are well groomed in generating and assessing options of ideology and development. The ways of executing choices have also to be charted.