Issue link: http://www.e-digitaleditions.com/i/94708
Captains of Industry "Some larger companies have gone through the transformational changes required, but there are still massive gaps between large companies that get this and genuinely believe in it, and those who have yet to scratch the surface," says Margaret Spink, managing director, at HRO provider Xchanging HR Services in London. This is unfortunate on several levels. In the current war for talent, companies need someone to lead the charge. This point was brought home back in 2008, when a McKinsey & Company survey indicated that 59 per cent of organisations do not spend enough time on talent management. "Companies like to promote the idea that employees are the biggest source of competitive advantage," the authors of the study stated. "Yet, the astonishing reality is that most of them are as unprepared for the challenge of finding, motivating, and retaining capable workers as they were a decade ago." Arguably the same still holds today. What has changed in the interim is intensifying competition for talent. According to a 2012 CareerBuilder survey of more than 3,000 hiring managers and HR professionals in diverse industries, 30 per cent of employers lost their top talent to other organisations last year, and 43 per cent are concerned about losing these high performers this year. "As a community, the HR sector has struggled to maximise human capital assets," acknowledges Jill Goldstein, global offering lead of human resources BPO at consultancy Accenture. Others agree. "We're far away from where HR should be to create value out of human capital," charges Jan-Pieter Janssen, director of global BPO solutions at consultancy Logica in the Netherlands. Assessing and measuring human capital outcomes is still elusive, as is the ability to understand how investments in talent will generate value, he maintains. Steve Foster, business consultancy manager in the London office of HRO provider NorthgateArinso, posits an even more pessimistic view. "There was a time when human capital management almost became part of company lore, but it now seems to have disappeared," Foster explains. "There was all this excitement about it, but for whatever reason people drifted away from it. That said, I do think it will make a comeback." Role of HR Are we there yet? The answer, by and large, is no, according to several deep-thinkers on the subject. While the promise of HR outsourcing is closely aligned with this lofty ideal, by liberating HR from mundane functional tasks to focus on more strategic talent objectives, HR still has a ways to go to maximise their companies' human capital. As part of this hoped-for comeback of human capital maximisation, the role of HR requires revisiting and new appreciation. There are both customers of HR and consumers of HR; understanding the differences is important to delivering on each. The customers of HR are those purchasing goods or services from the organisation—the client, in effect, "buying" the organisation's FALL 2012 | www.hroglobal.com [11]