The future of HR in South Africa post-Marikana
I submit not! The recent tragic events at Marikana underscore the fact that all the stakeholders and the HR 'profession' must bear some responsibility for what happened.
I submit not! The recent tragic events at Marikana underscore the fact that all the stakeholders and the HR 'profession' must bear some responsibility for what happened.
Who among us HR 'professionals' can honestly be smug and complacent? What happened with Marikana could have happened in our own organisations. As HR practitioners we lack the vision to look beyond the factory gates, mining shafts or office doors. We fail to understand the realities beyond our security fences; which impact upon the business. And anything that impacts on the business, particularly with regard to human/social issues, then it is the business of the HR practitioner.
We are too inwardly focused for our own good. We refer to ourselves as 'business partners'; we crave to be taken seriously; we lobby government to be declared a recognised and regulated profession. We are obsessed with recognition as a profession and we stress about HR competencies. If we are supposedly 'business partners', then our roles and contributions should reflect precisely that.
So, what to do, where to now? As former President Nelson Mandela remarked just after the first ever inclusive general elections in 1994; "The party is over, now it is time to work". Since then, on some levels, much has obviously changed, but on other levels, not much. There is massive unemployment, the income differential or 'wage-gap' is ever-increasing, public service delivery stumbles along, the education system is imploding. Institutionalised corruption in government and the public sector has reached virtual pandemic proportions, SETA's are awash with corporate funds but make little difference in skills development and monopolies and marketing collusions are regularly exposed. Antipathy towards industry charters and towards government's well-intended national health and retirement plans are on record and poverty is a national crisis.
Not only are most of these realities causes of the high levels of crime in the country, they are also firmly within the sphere of the HR "profession" to manage. If we continue to be inwardly focused, i.e. concerned with just the traditional transactional HR / IR functions in our respective organisations, we will be risking the rewards of what the rainbow nation can reap; nay, risking possibly even our own 'Arab Spring'.
However, as HR specialists, we can choose to be more strategic and outwardly focused. By this, I mean in crafting our annual HR strategies, we as HR, should analyse the external environmental factors as well, to make it possible for CEOs to create HR strategies that manage these external threats and opportunities. For example, job creation is an 'antidote' to unemployment and is generally seen as a lasting approach to the redistribution of opportunity.
Yet often HRs sole 'raison d'etre' in our respective organisations is to reduce employment, to freeze recruitment, to outsource employment to labour brokers, or worse, to retrench. Do we as a cadre of HR persons rub our hands with glee when there is factionalism or inter-union rivalry in our organisations – or are we deeply concerned instead and engage the respective factions to broker a win-win solution for the sake of the stakeholders concerned?
What HR should concern itself with is genuine economic empowerment - e.g. outsourcing goods and services to its own existing employees and helping them to be successful suppliers of the goods and services to their former employer.
HR should actively promote the development of in-house skills and/or through SETAs to which it already contributes handsomely – if the particular SETA is not functioning effectively, HR should make it its business to remedy that. HR should facilitate creative solutions to assist employees to afford decent housing, suitable and safe transport to places of work and ensure that employees, who we often and glibly refer as the organisation's greatest asset, have at least one nourishing meal per day.
These are not 'nice-to have's', but business imperatives in an afro-centric context
HR should accelerate CSR initiatives; not just the donation of guilt-money or favour-seeking donations for a new school laboratory, but continuous and sustainable partnering with community organisations, schools, hospitals etc. through transfer of skills and enter into workable permanent public-private partnerships at local community level. The opportunities for the body of HR corps in SA are endless to prevent another Marikana.
HR should never be the same again post-Marikana - the choice however is ours as HR personnel – "now it is time to work" and the HR Responsible can make a real, credible and profound difference. Marikana is HR's wake-up call!
