The modern
HR practitioner brings to the organization a systems and competitive mindset,
seeks to understand the goals the organization wants to achieve, and designs
and implements HR systems and strategies to facilitate achievement of those
goals. The intricacy of managing human resource to obtain optimum utilization
requires certain specialist skills and these are the skill-set embedded in HR
practitioners
As HR Practitioners, we occupy a very enviable and
strategic position in organizations and society at large. This is simply because we are the “experts”
when it comes to areas of resourcing, training, motivating, managing and
utilization human capital.
As custodians of the policies and procedures of any
organization, are we living up to our responsibility? Why have we been marginalized
all these years as compared to our marketing and accounting counterparts? Admittedly,
we may have contributed or allowed ourselves to be relegated to insignificance
in organizations in Ghana. We find quite a number of our colleagues ducking and
diving and allowing themselves to be pushed around by some CEOs or Accountants,
who have little or no clue about how to optimize human capital.
Though we admit that the practice of Human Resource
Management has been in Ghana for some time now, its
impact has been minimal due to varied reasons, some of
which are:
1. Society is largely uninformed about
the intricacies of HR practice
2. HR is populated by diversely educated
professionals, who are knowledge in other related professions. This diversity
causes identification with differently constituted professions, e.g. Industrial
Psychology, Labour law, Industrial Sociology etc.
3. There are multiple points of entry
into the profession from other disciplines, with the borders seeming endlessly
permeable.
4. The HR field has been known to be used
to “dump” unsuccessful managers from other disciplines, greatly to the
detriment of the reputation of HR. With no entry barriers the quality of
entrants cannot be screened.
For
example, the HR Professional body in Ghana (i.e. Institute of Human Resource
Management Practitioners-Ghana) has been in existence for years, yet its
influence is still very minimal as compared to other Professional bodies. Its
lack of legal mandate (legislative instrument) has created a vacuum of
regulating the practice of the HR profession in Ghana and this has largely contributed to the acute shortage of
quality human resource management professionals in the country. The ripple
negative effect of this are poor formulation & implementation of HR
strategies, policies, procedures and systems; poor design, interpretation and
implementation of employee terms and conditions of service; industrial tension
and frequent strikes; poor work ethics, low employee morale and motivation, to
mention a few.
If
HR managers do not accurately anticipate the future and do not plan
appropriately, they affect more than plans, machines, sales and numbers, they
touch people’s lives. Mistakes can hardly ever be undone. To put the workforce
into the hands of unqualified people is a recipe for disaster.
HR
leaders in multinationals have moved to positions of influence and are very
visible because they directly and indirectly touch everyone in the company, from
entry to retirement, set the standards and norms for behavior within the
company, and coach other leaders to demonstrate the leadership brand.
It
is against this background that regulation of HR is absolutely necessary and
critical for industry. While it remains the ideal to self-regulate and work
with passionate and totally committed people, in a big system, this is rarely
achievable. Regulatory minimum standards will have a profound impact on the
quality of the profession.
The professional body would concern itself with
enhancing both the informal and the formal enforcing of minimum standards on a
continual basis.
If
the increasing importance of the HR role in managing human capital is accepted,
together with the economic and social imperatives for this function to be
practiced effectively, it can be inferred that the time has come to formalize
the professionalization of HR in Ghana.
Extensive
consultations with HR practitioners and related bodies have clearly indicated
that there is an awareness and acceptance of the necessity to regulate. There
is also a growing acceptance in business that professional registration is a
benchmark of quality and it is becoming more common-place to find registration
required when applying for an HR position. With this, companies will appoint
professionally registered HR practitioners to the top echelon of Human Capital
Management as a measure of best practice. It is also believed that by setting a
recognized and uniform standard of competence and professionalism, good governance
will be enhanced and industrial strikes reduced.
All
HR Practitioners in Ghana should come together and lobby the Ghana Government
to endorse the process and enact a legislation to create a professional body
that
will provide training & expert advice in Human Resource Management and
regulate the practice of the HR profession as is prevalent in Kenya, South Africa, Nigeria and the UK.
By: Ebenezer Ofori Agbettor
Executive
Director
Institute
of Human Resource Management Practitioners-Ghana
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