Given the reports that indicate that Singapore workers’ ongoing laments about lack of work-life balance, nurturing leadership/mentoring/grooming, discrimination at work, discrimination against married or pregnant female employees, and discrimnatory recruitment practices, it sure looks like HR needs more than just a bigger hand.
This story was printed from TODAYonline A bigger hand for HR
Personnel want to play more strategic role in firms, rather than fire-fighting
Wednesday • January 17, 2007
Jasmine Yin
jasmine@mediacorp.com.sg
TOP executives need to lead more with their hearts and guts, rather than their brains.
Such multi-dimensional leadership will satisfy the intellectual and emotional needs of workers, said Mr Rajan Srikanth, Asia’s president of human resource consultancy Mercer.
“Traditionally, most companies have relied on the ‘head’ — where leaders use their logical and analytical expertise — as the primary dimension of leadership. But it’s not good enough because the context today — such as globalisation, outsourcing and IT issues — is very uncertain,” he told Today.
Building leadership capability ranked among the top three human resource (HR) challenges in Singapore last year, behind retaining and acquiring key talent.
This was according to Mercer’s Asia study of 618 participants, who were mostly senior HR executives with over five years’ experience in the field.
Of these, 97 were from Singapore, which had the highest number of participants after China.
In particular, HR personnel here lamented their inability to play a more strategic role because they were too busy fire-fighting (60 per cent) or were perceived as poor performers by their leaders (about 50 per cent).
Both these figures were higher than the overall average for the regional study, which included Malaysia, Thailand, Hong Kong, India, Japan and the Philippines.
Local respondents said they spent much more time on transaction and record-keeping (28 per cent) than the amount they desired (12 per cent).
They would also like to at least double their time spent on designing HR programmes (21 per cent) and strategic planning (29 per cent), as compared to what they have currently (about 11 per cent on each).
Mercer’s senior consultant Adam Kassab, who oversaw the study, pointed out that there is nothing wrong for HR personnel to be interested in administration, as it is vital to an organisation’s survival.
“A HR person needs to be a good administrator. If not, you will not have a good, efficient system to operate on,” concurred Singapore Human Resources Institute executive director David Ang, who spoke to Today recently about the intense global competition for talent.
About three in five local survey respondents felt that it is important to work with HR in a business. But of that figure, nearly half felt that a HR department has no decision-making power within an organisation.
However, the status of HR in Singapore has gained ground over the past few years, according to the study results.
Last year, 40 per cent saw HR as valuable — a sharp rise from 10 per cent in 2003. And just under 10 per cent perceived it as “a cost” last year, vis-à-vis slightly more than 60 per cent in 2003.
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