The article I have chosen is around the question whether ‘HR can be a strategic partner to business’ and how? One of the reasons I chose this article is because during our combined class with the Temple
Executive MBA batch, we realized that a lot of business people do not consider HR to be a strategically thinking department. It was quite surprising as well as shocking to hear that, according to business, HR is considered a clerical and administrative domain. This article talks about why businesses perceive HR to be non-strategic, what failures organizations had to go through due to lack of HR involvement or HR strategic partnership and it also talks about how we can help HR to become a business partner.
This is an extremely important article for us as HR practitioners because as market demands continue to change, organizational success will hinge on HR’s ability to connect human capital decisions with business strategy. HR will need to stop clinging to traditional processes and inefficient silos and move
toward an integrated approach that links work and people to business results. The case for HR being a strategic partner is becoming stronger, as it rests on the reality that human capital and how it is organized are increasingly pivotal to organization effectiveness. There is ample evidence that how human capital is recruited, developed, organized and managed has a direct and strong influence on organizational performance. Today HR does have a role in strategy but that it is usually not a full partner. The most common role is the ‘input role’ where most of the times HR is only asked for data and opinion when formulating any strategy. HR needs to do more than just understanding the business; it needs to establish specific connections between business issues and how human capital affects them.
There are instances quoted in this article where mergers have failed or new business set ups have