Economic planners often clueless about workforce patterns

CEO of HR Cornucopia Dinesh Weerakkody speaking at the ‘hSenid International HRM User Conference 2011’ at the Hilton Colombo on Friday observed that business planners and economic planners need to understand and be sensitive to ever-changing workforce trends, because matching vital skills/aspirations to needs is going to determine whether jobs will stay or move into other markets in the coming months and years.

The financial crisis, according to Weerakkody, did not merely create cause cyclical job losses. It created an unemployment chasm. Post financial crisis, the education premium – the payoff of earning a good degree – will grow larger and they will get an increasing share of the jobs created both locally and abroad.

Speaking on the role of the HR professional, Weerakkody observed that CEOs now expect HR to partner with management to deliver the numbers and deliver the people.

To do that effectively, he said HR professionals would need to:

Have a good understanding of work force trends and know how to respond to them.

Manage employee rewards aggressively and creatively. That would require performance differentiation. Initiate reward and recognition programs to maximise compensation ‘spend’ and also the communications/marketing of the reward programmes.

Demonstrate greater HR skill and competence. That would require more vigour in HR team assessments and weeding out poor performers, skills in workforce analytics, competence in managing shared services, improving operational effectiveness by integrating technology into HR and institutionalising governance/compliance across the business.