Staff not just money driven

By Adam Gifford

HUMAN resources departments are increasingly important for the survival of companies and must embrace technology and add strategic roles to their administrative functions.

That is the advice Row Henson, PeopleSoft's vice-president of global human resource management systems strategy, has been giving New Zealand customers and prospects.

"HR has for many years been incredibly focused on administration and record keeping," she says.

"In a knowledge economy you have to get HR out of the back office into the world.

"The work face is changing. What motivates a worker with a 'job for life' mentality is different from a worker in a disloyal work environment. It's not just about what is important to the employer anymore."

She says the average worker now spends less than five years with one company. Getting the right person in the first place is important, but so is retaining and developing them. Firms must realise employees are driven by more than money.

"At PeopleSoft I want a casual environment to work, access to the latest technology, I want to work whenever I want to work wherever I want to work, I want to enjoy the people I work with, I don't want people standing over my shoulder. Those are the sort of reasons why people come to Peoplesoft."

Compensation strategies must also change, she says. Younger staff might want more training or time off, while older staff may want a greater contribution to retirement packages.

Payroll systems must be flexible.

If HR departments don't change, Row Henson says, they could find themselves outsourced.

While outsourcing of some functions may make sense, organisations must make sure they keep control of their data.

"If you outsource data along with everything else, you can never analyse the impact of that data."

HR needs to include analysis of the impact of work processes and employee development.

"It's what I call closing the loop. You look at getting the work out and in some cases not just reorganising but reinventing it. Now I want to close the loop and measure the impact of these things. Are people being more productive because of changes to training or recruitment processing? So you need data warehousing, OLAP [on line analytical processing] and other capabilities."

Row Henson says PeopleSoft is positioned better for the e-business wave than other enterprise resource planning (ERP) software vendors.

"Client/server computing or ERP was MRP (material requirements planning) with manufacturing at its centre and HR was about feeding the shop floor schedule.

"Now we've moved from 70 per cent of all business being manufacturing oriented to 70 per cent being services oriented, and services has at its centre people. It's about people, it's about competencies.

"We think the leaders will be those who say 'My people are my greatest assets and we are going to empower them, and that knowledge is what is going to make me competitive. We will create the best practice, not copy the best practice.'

"The best practice is being adaptable or being able to adapt to change quickly."