Businesses are Evolving, but are Human Resources Departments?

The Center for Effective Organizations at the University of Southern California’s Marshall School of Business has described progress in the HR world as “glacial.”

While it’s unclear whether the slow pace in a rapid world is due to people digging their heels into the ground, or there just not being a targeted focus on MAKING changes, it is clear that CEOs are disappointed in a number of ways. The group interviewed 22 business leaders and the chief areas where leadership feels HR isn’t living up to expectations are:

• Analytics
• Business Acuity
• Risk Management
• Executive Strategy
• Change Management
• Talent Management
• Organizational/Culture Shaping
• Building Leadership

The areas where departments outside of HR are typically rocketing forward are in the use of technology, dissolving hierarchies, embracing mobile devices as business communication tools, and advances in business automation.

So what is the solution? For many organizations it’s going to come down to one word: Flexibility. Changing employment models to include full time, part time, freelance/consultant, and outsourced functions will allow for pieces of the HR puzzle to be specialized as well as optimized. And it just so happens that we at InfoQuest already have some of those specialized functions in place for when your organization needs them: