Canadian HR Reporter Weekly

2 Canadian HR Reporter, a Thomson Reuters business 2018 CANADIAN HR REPORTER WEEKLY While there's been much talk over the years about HR's move to become more strategic, recent changes in the workplace are pushing the profession even further, ac- cording to a group of academics. For one, there's a permeation of HR throughout the organization, said Nita Chhinzer, associate professor and graduate advisor in the department of management at the University of Guelph in Ontario. "In the last few decades, we've seen organizations really take a much more organic approach to who's responsible for activities," she said. "We see this in things such as the competency-based approach to jobs, and we've also seen this in things such as job descriptions where an individual may be responsible for HR functions within their role, but they're not given an HR job." At Google, for example, people who aren't in human resources may crowdsource recruitment, said Chhinzer, leading a panel discussion of academics at the Ted Rogers School of Management at Ryerson University in Toronto in June. "Essentially, there's a whole pile of non-HR functions that are being permeated through the organization that a lot of managers, entrepreneurs, line managers are responsible for." Work is fundamentally changing, said Dionne Pohler, assistant professor at the Centre for Industrial Relations & Human Resources at the University of Toronto, citing the increasingly contingent workforce. "HR has to really grapple with that changing nature of work," she said. "We're seeing less permanent, full-time careers — not just that people are switching organizations more frequently but we're actually seeing a fundamental change in how work is managed inside organizations." "ere's a lot more scope for HR people to really think clearly about how we actually have a lot of different employment systems within the same organization, increasingly more so, and to think about how that actually changes the nature of the HR person's role." ere's no longer one consistent policy for each employee — there can be more of a mishmash, said Pohler. "For HR people to be really successful… they have to be able to really deal with systems thinking — not even just strategic thinking — systems thinking across multiple levels and across silos in the organization. HR is the only area in organizations that is uniquely situated to be able to do that, so that's one major competency." Another important skill is a tolerance for ambiguity, she said. "ere's so much more uncertainty today that even if we use… evidence-based thinking and application of ideas, the reality is most of these studies that show correlations, causality between X and Y, that's based on data in the past, and the world is changing. And so those same constraints or circumstances may not be there in the future, so we have to really think about what that means for how we move forward and how we make policies in uncertainty, when we don't necessarily know what the outcomes or what the input variables are even going to be." York University's HR programming has shifted from a focus on the functional areas of HR — such as compensation and talent selection — to leadership competencies and decision-making, accoding to Marie- Hélène Budworth, assistant professor of human resource management at York University in Toronto. Changing workplace changing HR Greater focus on systems thinking, analytics, decision-making: Panel BY SARAH DOBSON Sign up for the Canadian HR Newswire today for free and enjoy great content from the publishers of Canadian HR Reporter. HR News at Your Fingertips THE LATEST NEWS THE BEST COMMENTARY DELIVERED WEEKLY FOR READING ON ANY DEVICE Visit www.hrreporter.com/ canadian-hr-newswire

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