HR Pulse

SA HR practitioners haven’t yet realised that they are strategic business partners

Over the past year or so, there has been a lot of talk about HR being strategic partners with business leaders and that this function needs to step up and claim their rightful role at the C-level of the organisation. However, this is not happening says Buyani Zwane CEO at Breakthrough Development and part-time lecturer at the Gordon Institute of Business Science.

HR and members of the C-suite are speaking at cross purposes: HR moans that management doesn’t give them enough attention but they don’t make any move to change how they’re currently doing their jobs. The problem is that management no longer needs what HR is producing because they are concentrating on capturing leave forms and the like while what is actually needed are more strategic HR services, e.g. building a talent pipeline.

HR needs to position itself as a value provider, spending a lot more time gaining business expertise and less time on filling out paperwork.

Says Buyani: “All strategies in business are put together without any input from HR. From my point of view, HR needs to look into itself and ask how they are preparing their people to become confident about their contribution. They need to be working from the inside out.”

How can HR start to add value to the organisation?

Buyani used the term ‘vuca’ to describe the climate in an organisation:

This means that in any organisation, there are always degrees of volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity

The problem comes in where the line manager responds to the degree of ‘vucaness’ and attempts to bring it down to acceptable levels, but the HR professional is totally unaware of what is inherent in vuca and the need to stabilise the volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity in the company. Buyani says to make HR and management strategic business partners, HR needs to get clued up about how the fundamentals of the organisation function first and then work their way out.

Focus and energy levels vary in organisations

Inside any organisation, there are high and low energy levels and high and low focus levels.

What tends to happen in many organisations is that when you have a lot of people who need to deliver on a project, there is no energy or focus and a lot of procrastination. In other words, they’re in quadrant C.

By the time the team members wake up to what needs to be done, time has passed and now tasks become urgent. They move rapidly into quadrant D – where the team in highly energised but is not focused. However, the problem with this is that because they aren’t focused on what they’re doing, they don’t treat their tasks as important.

As the employees get closer to the deadline, they increase the energy with which they are completing their tasks. However, the quicker they try to work the more likely they are to make mistakes.

“HR practitioners,” says Buyani, “are in quadrant D where they are doing a lot of things, because they need to be seen to be busy doing something, but ultimately, aren’t achieving much.”

We need to motivate HR practitioners to be purposeful

When you institute ‘vuca’ in your organisation, you need to replace:

1.    Volatility with vision,
2.    Uncertainty with understanding,
3.    Complexity with clarity, and
4.    Ambiguity with agility.

However, you won’t be able to do this with a complement of disengaged staff. So to ‘vuca-ready’ your organisation, you need to move them into a high-focus, high-energy space.

Buyani Zwane will be speaking about HR Aiming  to Deliver the Value – the Inside out Approach Revisited at this year’s IPM Convention from 3 – 6 November at Sun City. Follow this link to read more.

Lia Marus is the editor of HR Pulse. She has a BA in French, Italian and Linguistics from UCT, an MA in translation from Wits and a Postgraduate Diploma in Management from the Wits Business School. She is currently studying towards her LLB through Unisa. Lia started her career off in corporate communications, where she worked as a sub-editor, researcher and marketing coordinator. She then heeded the call of the publishing world and went into the business-to-business publishing field. She worked as a sub-editor as well as a chief sub-editor. Before joining ITWeb, she managed an HR guidebook at a leading international publishing company.