The Industrial Revolution during the 19th century and the exponential growth needs after the First and the Second World War brought in development of urbanisation in major cities in the world. This lead to large-scale employment in industries, which grew unwieldy without any basic foundation for and industrial culture.

Hawthorne study, which revealed various basic necessities at work to promote efficiency and harmony at work place and to establish working conditions that would best suit the industrial and various working environment. The enrichment of knowledge about human behaviour by the Hawthorne study set the trend for the transition in Human Resources Management. Revival of Chrysler Corporation by Lea Iacocca during the 1980’s became a monumental rehabilitation work for revival of sick organisations. The expansion of the IBM and promotion of GE practices exemplified by Jack Welch accelerated in establishing the healthy working practices to promote Organisational efficiency.

“Maverick” practiced by Ricardo Semler (Brazil) has become a unique and inspirational model wherein the practices employees decided their own salaries, timings of work, leave and the workplace surroundings and various other factors and facilitating business decisions.

The people centric Japanese work culture that gave the industries the benefit of developing world class products set a paradigm shift for all at work towards developing for super performance and work culture. These have set the trend for a genetic change in the evolution of Human Resource Management. 

Many models that are being practiced today are positioned somewhere between the Hawthorne and the Ricardo Semler’s model. This is certainly driving many practices for promoting pockets of HR excellence.

Trends of radical change

This has been mainly because of the global economic scenario and alignment of paradigm accordingly. It is now more obvious that this evolution is now being accelerated due to business compulsions, globalised economy associated with Mergers & Acquisitions and severe competition.

The knowledge based organisations has shown greater importance to create and retain talents and promote excellence in people which have supported & supplemented with various global quality models. These two extremes have set many thought process and practices rolling for business efficiency through effective people management process and hence the change in the DNA of Human Resource Management.

Further the constant progress in the business excellence models, global and regional recognition of best managed organisations and quality modules such as ISO-9000 or 9001, QS-9000, SEI-CMM, CMMi, P-CMM and other BS modules have engendered a transformation change in the HRM.

The transition phase:

*The labour welfare concept during the 50’s was riddled with statutory obligations and compliances to enforce safe and healthy work place. This is mainly a supportive and implementation role.
*This was followed by an industrial relations era during the 60’s and 70’s emphasising on trade union and management relations. This was mainly dominated for marginally supportive and predominantly a maintenance and re-active role. 

This era was followed by the era of personnel management in the 70’s. This phase enlarged the scope of people management even covering the needs of the management cadre.

This phase changed to Human Resource Management starting from the 90’s with a much broader outlook mainly to meet the transformation of HRM in its contents, style, approach and the chemistry of management practices.
  This phase to a large extent is an organisational development phase and assumed the right importance of “Organisational Culture and Employee Engagement”.

Expectations in HRM

Thus the people management though had a revolutionary trend upto industrial relations approach, has been enjoying a transformation and evolutionary trend thereafter thus moving from ad-hoc people based decisions to the present rational and metric based decisions supported by metric based policies & practices. The nature of employment has also been phenomenally changing in an evolutionary manner from fixed hours to flexible hours, full time with extended hours to part-time and limited hours, time based to performance/assigned based payment methods and working from an office location to working from home & virtual locations and localised management control to global and virtual place of work demanding a complete re-look into the managing the work engagement pattern and work place.

Thus all the above changes have clearly forced a change in the DNA of HRM. The basic focus and the fundamentals are to be rightly understood to make sense to the facets of HRM.

The speed of expectations, the contents and its magnitude is to support the business expectations and to partner in business and organiSational growth. In fact the expectations are very fast, high standards, and unprecedented for any reference. .

Thus the approach to and expectations from HRM has also changed to one that of local/national to that of global customer, global practices with global bench-mark and global competitive edge.

The globalisation has enhanced the technology, business and global economics, phenomenal mergers & acquisitions with sequential consolidation of the business activities, improved competitive edge and business standards, the speed of business execution with global product & services.

The market compulsions, global quality standards have phenomenally made a demand on HRM to change its structure, approach, functioning with a greater result orientation.

Thus, HRM today is moving from just people driven to business driven approach.  HR strategically with a business sense to be part of the mainstream of the organisation are expected to facilitate the following needs.

*Accelerated turn-out rate in managing people to adapt, contribute and to align with organisation to facilitate apt and healthy competition.
*Managing growth, business process skills, facilitative growth and policies & practices that facilitates growth & merger & acquisitions, virtual campus, virtual money, company identity, networking competence across countries, people branding etc.

*Promoting various forms of employment that are unconventional to meet various forms employment needs from local to national and further to international locations making it a global employment of larger magnitude.
*Managing heterogeneous work groups, business complexities, anticipative compensation & benefit practices, better coordination of resources and projects across geographies, managing cross-functional needs with diagnostic and facilitation skills under geographical dispersed conditions, to match the speed of the activity and business with specific service level agreements for sustenance and growth of critical/niche process.
*Managing virtual teams, self managed teams, heterogeneous workforce with leadership development and management of change, global employees, global culture, virtual work place.

*practice business supportive models, bench-mark, compete and follow global practices and models than just reactive, supportive and maintenance oriented HR practices.

*Retention oriented culture, integrative and business supportive with compensation not as the main factor.
*Talent management and performance management system with clear metrics for evaluation with scope for retaining and promoting talents within the organisation.

*Training & development practices to be specific to support business competition and growth and to promote greater employability and organisational excellence.

*Employer branding and branding for HRM through value-added services, promoting better bench-mark of achievements thru people, enhancing engagement and employability.

Thus the complete activities in HRM function have become and dynamic, facilitative, organisation development oriented with cross functional aligned integration with a drive for bench-marking for efficiency and ultimately for business excellence to remain in the competitive edge.

The writer is GM-HR in Sasken Communication Technologies Ltd and can be contacted on sunder.rajan@sasken.com