Dear mishram, jyoti & friends,
At this stage of my life i have very clear and strong views on the objective of HR , as far
as i am concerned there is just one :
1.making the workplace more competetive by empowering people with responsibilty and commesurate authority rather than a comfortable place.
whatever is required to acheive this objective needs to be done i would not want to list all of them down as they will not be objectives of HR but procedures of attaining the above mentioned objectives.
and about quantifying, YES absolutely it needs ot be quantified, for HR no longer is to be seen as a cost center , we are the backbone of the company and every activity either originates or terminates at HR directly or indirectly. To start with if HR does not facilitate the hiring of the right people in any other department how will those departments ever acheive their so called quantifiable numbers.??? so everytime a department which has quatifiable objectives acheives a goal we at HR need to be gievn a certain percentage of the points. This way we shall be forerunners of acheivers in the numbers game. I am aware of the fact that if everyone runs after the numbers certain key issues which need attention will be ignored that is why i have suggested the above approach. it is somewhat akin to a home wherein the father goes out to earn and a mother keeps the home , both of which are equally difficult time consuming taxing and stressful jobs , in some cases more so for the mother who has to do it all by herself without social company as compared to the father. So do we say that the father is doing a better job because he brings home a pay packet at the end of the month? How would he have had the energy to work and earn if the mother had not sent him healthy home cooked food everyday? have we thought about that. That is exactly what is happening nowadays, all this talk about strss , burnout , worklife and personal life balance , violent children etc, what do you think is the reason for all this , very simple THE MOTHER AND FATHER BOTH ARE RUNNING AFTER THE NUMBERS. they have been caught in the circle of quantifying their contributions. Why did this happen , it hapened because of continuous neglect of the mother function and building up of the perception that the father function which is more quantifiable is more important . This approach drove the mother to do the same and now look at the consequences.
so i very strongly believe that HR needs to be left alone to do its job , yes quantification is neccessary but pls do not make it so obvious that we end up being the mothers who went to work driven by non appreciation of the wonderful and supporting function which they used to perform.
hope that i have made sense and that i have typed what i wanted to actually communicate as all these metaphors just poured in. I would like to discuss this further with anyone who is interested and maybe i could gain a different perspective .
regards anand |
