What does human resources management do?

Most HR people are more willing to interpret human resource management as "taking tonics", which are to strengthen the foundation of the enterprise. They are more willing to emphasize that the enterprise cannot do without human resource management, but are not willing to emphasize that human resource management can What strategic value is created? This makes bosses and business departments disgusted. Some companies even regard human resource management as the biggest factor constraining development, and have shouted the slogan "go away from human resource management" to drive HR out of the company. So, in the era of new competition, where will human resource management go? Below is the knowledge I have brought to you about what human resources management is about. Welcome to read.

What exactly does human resource management manage?

The modern human resources management system has developed to be extremely complex. In addition to traditional functions and modules, a variety of dazzling emerging human resource practices (HR Practice, HRP) have also been loaded into the system. This seems to give consultants and HR a large area of ??"private space", but it also makes them forget the purpose of human resource management. In fact, putting aside these complexities, we can simply talk about a small management prophecy (fable).

1. Organizational model

Suppose there is a business founder who is optimistic about a project (goal), and he has several partners (people) who can participate, he will Group your friends into an "organization" to achieve your goals. Different people have different goals, and the organizational pattern is different, that is, different business models, business processes, organizational structures and job systems are needed to clarify where and what role each person should play. At this stage, because the company has few people and the business has grown from scratch, it is the company founder, not HR, who decides the organizational model (the founder has never thought about HR intervention).

2. Three major support mechanisms (systems)

In the beginning, everyone relied on their friendship with the founder and their expectations for the company’s prospects to work, and they each performed their own duties. Be methodical. However, as the business grows larger and the number of people increases, problems arise with this organizational model. As a result, the organizational model began to expand, the scope of management became larger, and there were more management levels. The founder and boss were no longer able to monitor the working status of employees in each position. Some positions may not necessarily have the most suitable people, which requires a deployment mechanism to recruit, promote, demote, horizontally deploy, and eliminate the most suitable people in the most suitable positions so that they can "have the opportunity to do the job." "; Some people do not have enough ability to complete the job, which requires training and development to make them "able to do it"; some people do not have enough willingness to complete the job, which requires designing performance and compensation to motivate them. "Willing to do it". These three support mechanisms ensure that people in the organizational model can operate in the way preset by the organizational model. At this stage, human resource management needs to provide more and more functions, and professional HR intervention is increasingly needed, and "technical rigidity" is initially established.

3. Three major management foundations (evaluation system)

There must be certain standards for deployment, training and motivation. Enterprises begin to have a clear understanding of people (input), organization (process) and goals. (output) is defined, resulting in three major management foundations (evaluation system): competency assessment, job assessment (it is difficult for HR to intervene in the business model, business process and organizational structure) and performance assessment. We can use the three major support mechanisms and the three major management foundations to form a two-dimensional matrix. I call this model the "Nine-Gong Grid of Human Resources Management." For example, training content may come from three aspects: competency assessment to confirm competency shortcomings; job evaluation to confirm job content; and performance evaluation to confirm performance shortcomings. Incentives are also based on the same principle: pay for abilities, pay for position and pay for performance. With these three magic weapons in hand, HRs have further strengthened the "technical rigidity" of their work.

4. Organization and job design

To put it more complexly, human resources management is based on three major management foundations and sets up three major support mechanisms to ensure that the organizational model operates as expected. Work. Of course, at certain times, HR may also intervene in the organizational model, such as adjusting the organizational structure and job system. Therefore, there are two functions: organizational structure design and job design, but in these two aspects, the boss and the business department Obviously more say.

5. Human resources planning

If the three major management foundations, the three major support mechanisms and the organizational model are fixed, the human resources management system will be like a machine that has been fully adjusted. What needs to be determined at this time? The talent supply chain needs to be managed. I suggest introducing the concept of "supply chain" because this concept is very clear. Do not let demand pile up waiting for production factors (people), nor let production factors (people) idle waiting for demand. When it comes to human resource management, it means to do "human resource planning" (this is a function that many HRs think is lofty). To put it simply, it means that the talent needs of the company in the development process can always be met in a timely manner.

6. Organizational Capacity Building

Under the premise of balancing the supply and demand of talents (even if there are fewer and fewer people), when employees act according to the presets of the organizational model, and Over a period of time, the behavioral patterns of various employees in the company will form a certain inertia. Organizational knowledge is precipitated, organizational rules are formed, and organizational values ??are achieved. This is organizational capability. Building organizational capabilities is not a specific human resource practice (HRP), but a combination of all the above HR practices, equivalent to a "policy package." Of course, in order to create organizational capabilities, this "policy package" must also meet the triple environmental standards of market, organization, and system in the Mos model.

So, no matter how complex HR describes its functions, human resource management is actually building a house. I also call this model the "house model". The house may be very simple at first, but the structure is there and everything is indispensable. As the company grows larger, the top floor of the house begins to become heavier, and the pillars supporting the system and the base of the evaluation system will become stronger and stronger (this may be different from the general rule of building a house). The house started to become a big house.

Go to human resources management?

The work of "house repair" is certainly professional, and its role for the enterprise is unquestionable. In the era of industrial economy, based on fixed organizational models, most of the support systems and evaluation systems created by human resource management have their own "routines." These routines constitute the "modern human resources management system" that HRs firmly believe in. But with the advent of the Internet era, organizational models have begun to become more flexible. If we still use the original "routines" of support systems and evaluation systems, it will be impossible to solve the problem.

Faced with this situation, most HR people who are unwilling to adjust like to explain human resource management as "taking tonics", which is to strengthen the foundation of the enterprise, and are more willing to emphasize that the enterprise cannot do without human resource management. , and are unwilling to emphasize what strategic value human resource management can create. On the surface, it seems to have resolved the crisis, but in fact it has dragged the industry into the abyss. The boss is an understanding person, so he naturally regards the human resources department as an organizational component that is “indispensable but not very useful”.

In some companies, HR and bosses get along with each other according to a tacit understanding between the two parties, and they get along well. But in other companies, the impact of the Internet business environment has put bosses under tremendous pressure, and they have to pass on the pressure to break this "harmony" and require HR to provide direct output (promote transformation). In this period of opportunity, HR was once entrusted with important tasks, but the results were lackluster. Managers once dreamed of changing the way the HR team works, but ended up encountering HR's incomparable "insistence" on professionalism. HR people who are accustomed to following the steps are becoming more and more confused and losing their sense of value. They can only continue to use the old routine of selecting, employing, educating and retaining to maintain their final dignity.

In the three years since its establishment, Xiaomi has achieved sales of 30 billion. Do they have human resource management? On the contrary, they believe that management is a way of not trusting employees, and that as long as they find a group of employees with the most ability and pursuit, everything will fall into place. The organization is extremely flat and even networked. Except for the founders who have titles, everyone else is an engineer; a sense of responsibility is used to replace KPIs, emphasizing responsibility for customers; all-hands meetings are rarely held to reduce the tediousness of multi-line reporting and focus on products. Virtual team operation; brutal salary increase, coupled with a transparent all-employee stock ownership plan... How can they have any human resources management?

When you look at the giant Netflix that is still standing after several iterations of business logic, you will find that "de-human resources management" seems to be the general trend.

We always think that enterprises need management and that "visible hand". Little do they know that by introducing the "invisible hand" of the market mechanism, each unit and even everyone in the enterprise can start to "operate" independently without the need for "management".

Human resources management cloud model

These companies do not have a fixed organizational model. The organizational structure, business processes, and even job systems are completely flexible. The departments and employees within the company present a different look. Compared with the "chaotic" networked collaboration, "virtual teams" seem to be more active. Everyone relies on their abilities to define their own scope of activities, but they continue to produce high performance.

Such a state is exactly the "cloud model" that is hotly discussed nowadays - after resources are "digitized", they are uploaded to a "cloud" that can be accessed by all demanders, and can be used by all parties. Class demands are infinitely low, utilization efficiency is maximized, and any demand can be responded to by the "cloud". "Cloud" originated from the Internet field, but it is an excellent "metaphor" in management, representing a form of resource aggregation and distribution.

In this new era of competition, what enterprises need is not "chaos", but "order in chaos" like the cloud model. To achieve "order in chaos", human resource management is necessary. Compared with supporting the original solid organizational model, supporting this cloud-based organizational model poses more challenges to human resources management.

It turns out that in the fixed organizational model, only a set of simple logic is needed. As long as employees work according to the definition of roles, they can achieve relatively simple and stable organizational goals; but in the cloud-based organizational model, a complex set of logic is needed. , define employees' actions on demand at any time, so that each employee can contribute his or her talents to the greatest extent and accomplish complex and ever-changing organizational goals. If the original human resources management model emphasized performance output, the new human resources management model emphasizes organizational capabilities. If the original human resources management model requires a set of systems or work plans, the new human resources management requires an infinitely powerful "resource allocation mechanism."

Therefore, enterprises also need "cloud incentives" and "cloud support", which form an "iron triangle" with cloud organizations. Cloud organizations solve the problem of "giving employees the opportunity to do their jobs." As long as employees have suitable abilities, they will not be restricted by the organizational structure, business processes, and job roles, and can have the opportunity to take on tasks. Cloud incentive solves the problem of "making employees willing to work". All incentive resources can be automatically adjusted and matched to the different performance of employees. Any employee's contribution to the enterprise will be quickly rewarded.

Now, companies do not need to directly recruit, reallocate or eliminate employees at all: external talents can even form an outsourcing relationship with the company and be used directly by the company, and the threshold for recruitment almost no longer exists; employees because of their own The ability is automatically allocated to the most appropriate position (not a fixed position) by the "invisible hand" to complete specific tasks. Naturally, there is no need for the "visible hand" in the organization; employees who are not needed take over. If they are not assigned tasks and cannot obtain corresponding incentives, they will naturally leave the organization automatically. Therefore, the three major support systems of traditional human resources management are simplified into two - "cloud incentive" and "cloud support".

On the one hand, “cloud organization + cloud incentives” is the current mainstream trend of human resource management, and models such as Amoeba, Rendanheyi, Wiki-style collaboration, and Holarachy are all practice in this direction. On the other hand, "cloud organization + cloud support" is another mainstream trend that human resource management will focus on in the future, which we will introduce in detail in Chapter 4. Although this is not as mainstream as the previous trend at the moment (so the management models listed in the previous part hardly involve this trend), with the iteration of business logic, the gap in employee knowledge and capabilities will become larger and larger. , there is an increasing need for cloud support from organizations.

What does cloud transformation require?

How to set up the two major support systems is the key to whether human resource management can achieve cloud transformation. There are two main ideas here:

1. Free market-the invisible hand

One way of thinking is the "free market" - if you don't know how to allocate resources, let the demanders decide according to market rules! In this way, HR should act as the "night watchman" of the company's internal market, set rules, supervise violations, conduct macro-control, and ensure the normal operation of the market mechanism.

For cloud incentives, pricing performance for boundaryless behavior is a difficult point. Haier uses products or services as media and uses purchase agreements to bid, which is a direct price signal; Kazuo Inamori uses unit time value to calculate contributions, and Shanda uses game points (virtual currency) to calculate contributions. Some companies I have observed Other interesting accounting methods are also used, these are "pseudo-price signals". When a company prices tasks clearly and fairly, and the more difficult the task, the higher the value, and the higher the price, employees will naturally pursue it, because this system will not "let Lei Feng suffer".

For cloud support, employees often cannot accurately describe the knowledge and abilities they have not yet mastered. Therefore, accurate and flexible measurement of employee knowledge and abilities is necessary. Several pioneering companies I have observed have either established knowledge bases composed of knowledge modules (called "knowledge cubes") or "key situations" (situations that best differentiate between high-performing and low-performing employees). behavior library. Just like the scene in the game, when employees can see their "energy value" in knowledge reserves and behavior patterns in a timely manner, they can freely choose what they need in the market for training resources.

2. Macro intervention - the visible hand

Although the design of the free market can solve the problem of resource allocation to a large extent, there are always times when the market fails. On the one hand, demand may not necessarily lead to resources, especially if the market is large enough. On the other hand, free markets sometimes exhibit short-term behavior that does not help build organizational capabilities or may lead to destructive uses of resources. Rather than carrying out macro-control after failure, we always hope that an almighty God will "correct" market deviations. Another idea at this time is macro intervention, that is, allocating motivation and training resources through visible hands. Externally, this is exactly what Keynesianism stood for. In fact, I have indeed observed cases in companies where Keynesianism is used to issue virtual currencies to stimulate employee behavior.

At present, we can vaguely see that human resource management is characterized by efficiency, greenness, gamification, etc. These models can always easily put enterprises on the right track.

However, the emphasis on efficiency, environmental compatibility, and pleasant processes are all manifestations of advantages rather than their essence. The essence behind these characteristics is "human resources management cloud transformation." In these models, all employees seem to be uploaded to the cloud and can be called upon by the enterprise at any time. The enterprise always seems to be able to maximize the use of human resources, just like turning on the faucet and using as much as it wants. All incentive resources seem to be uploaded to the cloud, and can be matched with employee performance at any time. You can have as many as you want, as long as they complete the corresponding tasks.