To some companies, the contest in which they are now entered seems increasingly less like baseball or other traditional games and more like the croquet game in Alice in Wonderland – a game that compels the player to deal with constant change. In that fictional game, nothing remains stable for very long, because everything is alive and changing around the player – an all-too-real condition for many managers.

The mallet Alice uses is a flamingo, which tends to lift its head and face in another direction just as Alice tries to hit the ball. The ball in turn, is a hedgehog, another creature with a mind of its own. Instead of lying there waiting for Alice to hit it, the hedgehog unrolls, gets up, moves to another part of the court, and sits down again. The wickets are card soldiers, ordered around by the Queen of Hearts, who changes the structure of the game seemingly at whim by barking out an order to the wickets to reposition themselves around the court.

Substitute technology for the mallet, employees and customers for the hedgehog, and everyone from government regulators to corporate raiders for the Queen of Hearts, and the analogy fits the experience of a growing number of companies. It is getting harder and harder for executives in Alice’s position to succeed by traditional corporate methods when technology, customer preferences, employee loyalties, industry regulations, and corporate ownership are constantly changing. Instead of simply keeping their own eyes on the ball , they have to watch all the changing elements of the game at once.

- Rosabeth Moss Kanter in "When Giants Learn To Dance"

May 1999. Just short of a few months of the new millennium. …….& definitely not a bad time for Human resources professionals to gear themselves up and think about the future. Their future! The future of HR!! It is time to plan, envision, prioritise and set goals for the new millennium. Although management, by its very nature, demands that HR professionals look ahead, it can be difficult, if not downright daunting, to see beyond the veil of 1998-99 and into the years beyond.

But what is wrong even if we remain the way we are at present. Does HR really need to change. If so, what is that which should change and to what extent? Are we referring to the entire reengineering of HR? These are a few questions, which we pose to ourselves and attempt to answer.

Innumerable books and articles have already been authored on this subject. A volley of symposiums and seminars has been persistently convened and continues. A lot of ideas have been generated and a few of them implemented too. Then what is the use of yet another paper?

In this paper, we are not speaking of a steady, incremental progression of HR to "strategic HR" as envisioned by many thinkers. We believe that the time has come for HR to fundamentally rethink the context in which it holds people. The success of organizations would depend on the extent to which the potential of their people is realized and they are self-expressed.

It is almost impossible and unethical for us to claim having done an elaborate review of literature published on the subject, because, it covers a whole gamut of thinking and suggestions. Authors have talked about almost every aspect of HR of future. To present a very concise view, Authors have mainly focused on

• HR as a strategic partner
• HR strategy emanating from the Business strategy
• HR’s growing role in the competitive environment

• Impact of Information technology on HR
• HR’s role in tackling the virtual offices of tomorrow
• Executive compensation as the major challenge of future
• HR’s role in reinventing its outlook
• The manpower scarcity
• Training & Development
• Revamping and improvement of its major functions like Performance Appraisal, Training & Development etc.
• Emergence of predominantly knowledge workers

But, we did not come across any article, which questioned the basic premises of HR-the way it is? A few of them did express their reservations on whether or not HR would survive? But it was more in terms of its strategy with respect to the issues outlined above. Thus, virtually, we observed that , "the basic tenets of HR" is an area which has not been touched upon.

And we began just there!

The result is a picture of HR and the work environment in the year 2000 that’s decidedly upbeat and confident in the status and influence of HR professionals. Although we paint a picture of HR taking a tangential path, or rather an altogether U-turn, taking completely unexpected twists and turns, it has its roots in reality.

We provide below a comparative study to show how the role of HR has evolved over the years.

As we see in the above table, HR has changed greatly since medieval times when the major motivational factors were basic human necessities and the role of HR was to arrange for these in proportion to the work done.

As mankind progressed and the standard of living improved, these traditional motivators changed. Employees were now considered as thinking and rational beings capable of making decisions. It was assumed that humans made decisions in a way so as to increase their state of general well being. Various behavioral scientists investigated the relationship between cause and effect, stimulus and response and came up with various motivational theories. The role of HR was to devise various schemes and policies so as to channelize the employees’ behavior along a desired path. It was assumed that by arranging rewards and punishments (better known as positive and negative reinforcements) one could modify and predict human behavior.

This system was partially effective, and to some extent employers could predict and control human behavior and people did function efficiently. With these efficiencies, business and in turn the quality of human life improved considerably. This system was suitable and quite successful in the static business scene of yesterday.

Today the scene has changed considerably, the old rules no longer apply, and the traditional hierarchical organization has given way to a flatter, more flexible organization. Product centered thinking has given way to process centered thinking. Perhaps, that is why business has been differently described as an orchestra (Peter Drucker), a chaos (Tom Peters) and a game of football (Michael Hammer).

The organization of the future will be radically different from what it is today. There will be more focus on teams and networks of teams..

The earlier giant corporation slowly lumbering towards its goals will have to give way to a more flexible and dynamic structure suited to responding to the changing environment.

The traditional hierarchical structure built on functional specialization will be transformed into a network of teams with specific tasks and goals. The team of the future will be more and more like a football team.

The characteristics of which are: -

1. One team leader, no other hierarchy.
2. The Team leader has full freedom to select, train and motivate the team members.
3. The Team leader treats all members equally and is sensitive to their specific strengths and weaknesses.
4. Each member knows all other members intimately.
5. Team spirit strongly connects the members together, all disputes and disagreements are sorted out jointly by the members and the captain.
6. All members are aware that their survival depends on the performance of all the others and the team as a whole.

In order for this model to be effective, organizations will have to fundamentally rethink the way they manage their people. To start with, the way they look at people must change. We need to ask ourselves these questions :-

• Are our employees fully utilized?
• Do they perform to their utmost potential?
• Are they fully self-expressed working for our organization ?

When we speak of full self–expression, we mean total involvement and complete commitment to the job.

In order to measure the level of "self-expression", we propose a simple 5-step test: -

The immediate response to this could be that there are some jobs, which are inherently boring, routine and uninspiring. This however is not true. It is the context in which one sees the job, which is more important than the content of the job itself. It is a matter of common experience that when we consider ourselves as working towards a significant goal, even the most dull tasks become meaningful and inspiring.

The future organization will be made up of teams, fast and flexible and dynamic teams of enthusiastic, motivated, creative and fully self – expressed people people. In such a context the team spirit and camaraderie amongst the members will greatly enhance satisfaction on the job.

Hence it follows that the role of HR will be: -

• To develop fully "self–expressed" individuals.
• To enable and facilitate their effective participation in teams.

 The futuristic HR model

Having already answered the first two questions: namely "Why must the role of HR change beyond 2000?" & "What will be the new role of HR beyond 2000?", let us now move on to answer the third and the most important question : that is " How will HR go about achieving its new role ?

As the focus changes from an individualistic work culture to a team based organization, the recruitment will also have to follow suit. Persons with good, communication skills and having ability to work in groups will be highly preferred. The strategy will shift from recruiting the most intelligent to the most adaptable and amiable. Companies will stress more on people having the right values and attitudes for team-work. As far as possible autonomy will be given to the team in selection of new members.

– Peter Schneider, "The Disney Group"

Training would play a very important role in letting HR achieve its goal to develop mature teams composed of self-expressed persons. After initial selection, training will be required to develop them into good team-players. Typically this training will consist of sensitivity training, self-awareness programs, relationship workshops, and team-building exercises.

To give an analogy here, it would be similar to a Football team or a Cricket team. Just like a team goes through rigorous training under a coach, before it ventures out for a match., we foresee the importance of a wide-scale training for all the employees.

HR, apart from selection and training as described above, would also shoulder an important responsibility of counseling the employees. It is expected that some members may experience conflict and confusion when they begin to work in teams. It is the responsibility of HR to counsel such persons and integrate them into the mainstream.

Also, in case any conflict arises, HR would play an important role in resolving such conflicts.

1. Homogeneous structure

What’s in a name?, here we refer to the traditional titles given to various roles in today’s organization.

For example, recently a major Steel manufacturing company renamed the title of "Junior Engineer" to "Engineer" in order to appease its employees. Immediately the demand came up to revise the designation of "Field controllers". After 2 years, as a result of rather compulsion, all "Engineers" were renamed as "Senior Engineers". BPL –Mobile calls its secretaries as "Member-support services" .

Will these titles be relevant? Or will HR go for a flatter, meaner structure? We believe that the teams of tomorrow would be something like Cricket teams or Football Teams of today. (See Box 1) One captain and the rest just players. Without any hierarchy!

Let us take an example the Indian cricket team. Saurav Ganguly is a batsman today. He was a batsman even 3 years back. Over the past 3 years, he has definitely added to his skills, his playing style, his stress tolerance, his ease at playing on foreign ground etc. But his designation has not changed. Tomorrow’s organizations also need to take a lesson from this and accordingly structure themselves. That is : Homogeneous structures,. A team-leader and the rest just players. Neither the team-leader nor the players would get any "fancier’ name over the years as they get more experienced.

Though various motivational theorists, academicians and the corporate world would disagree. This needs to be given a serious thought. The blind race by the corporate world to enhance the titles at a fast and incremental pace will not be relevant in teams anymore.

2. Combination of team & individual awards

Perhaps the best analogy one could think of here is, again, that of a cricket team. How do the eleven members of a team constitute a team? When the opponents are batting, it is virtually the whole team that toils it out in order to get the batsmen out. It is not just a bowler, not just a wicket-keeper and not just a fielder , but the team as a whole. If a bowler does a good job but the fielder drops a catch, the team fails. Also it has both individual as well as team-rewards. There is one "man of the match", one or two players can grab some other benefits and prizes sponsored by corporates, but at the end of the day, the team is still one.

There is a lot of hue and cry going on about the viability, relevance and effectiveness of individual vs. team rewards. Some authors debate that in order to sustain and foster team-environment in a corporate world individual awards should be discarded. We feel that by a prudent mix of team and individual awards one can achieve good results.

3. No career planning needed

This is yet another unique feature that we foresee for HR. One that naturally flows from the previous discussion. Given that job description, job specifications and job title would lose their relevance, there will be no career planning needed

4. Re-engineered Performance management:

Performance Appraisal has been regarded as a necessary evil. All the books say that a company should have a performance appraisal system, employees often express the desire for one and businessmen are keen to find out about them. Why then is Performance appraisal one of the areas of management most commonly complained about by employees and managers ? Or is it just an opportunity to have an annual chat with the boss to ‘get it all off your chest’.

As organisations begin to function in teams, the focus will shift to a continuous and ongoing Feedback system from all the team members including the leader as against the weekly or monthly appraisal.

5. OD integration and not intervention:

Organization development has become more of a fashion in today’s times. Hiring consultants and boasting that your company is "rethinking" has become more of a fad than a necessity. We are not attempting to say that an organization should not strive to take all possible measures to ensure the maximum capitalization for shareholders and customer satisfaction. All that we question here, is the style and the process used to do that. We feel that Organization development should be more of a integration, that is from within, consistently driven, motivated and achieved by the resources within. And definitely not in the form of intervention- an outside consultant coming and reengineering for you. Our foreseen HR strategy achieves just that. All the empowered, self–expressed teams would themselves take care of such issues.

6. Networking: Competition with outside teams

Business perspective is another issue, which would be highly required in tomorrow’s times. In order to maintain efficiency internal company teams will be constantly competing with externally available teams. This will ensure that the teams perform to their utmost efficiency and remain cost efficient.

The work force of tomorrow is going to be highly self-expressed and team driven. As HR moves from Human Resource to Human Response, HR skills need to be redefined. HR persons will be more sensitive, dynamic leaders and revolutionary change agents in the workplace. They will require a highly developed and extremely sensitive understanding of the human being which will be more experiential and more profound as compared to the contemporary behavioral theories.

We have seen in this paper why the role of HR needs to change, what is going to be the new role of HR and also how HR will achieve its new role. We have chosen to focus our attention on that primary aspect which is the very cause of the existence of HR --- The Human Being.

We believe that the Human Being is the most underutilized resource and a large amount of human potential lies untapped. By understanding human beings and providing the appropriate environment it is possible to harness that latent power within the human being, which will make all the difference between success and failure in the time to come, the power of the human spirit.

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