Or aquisition? Thanks to better human resource management practices over the last few years, HR will merge/marry with other functions such as marketing and communications. Social media and emerging web technologies in general are used for recruiting (finding prospective employees), marketing (creating business opportunities), building relationships (getting connected with the community) and in general feeding relevant information into the world.

New organizational forms are currently taking shape. Organisation and change is becoming more viral and I have recently considered what that means for the big corporation (See Microsoft’s Creative Destruction in the New York Times) and HR. In writing a quick post for my new traditional Monday morning regimen I observe three forms – there may be more so please feel free to add or detract.

Form A Outsourcing: Transactional and processing where change happens through continuous improvement.

Form B Execution: Change oriented where projects are the only activity responsible for capability and agility or people and organisation (solutions model).

Form C Social: Organisational innovators and architects, companies transform through innovation, systems thinking, feedback mechanisms from Type A + B, customers, etc.

The forms are radically different and market forces will drive specialisation. New forms evolve where people take on roles, not specific positions, and where interactivity, collaboration, and strong communication skills are the primary competencies.  This organizational form may be virtual, distributed, and work can be and is shared. Responsibility and ownership are shared, as are rewards.

A good example of this is Txt Eagle (a mobile crowd-sourcing application) who in the 6 weeks of 2010 have become the largest employer in Kenya. The firm, started in its original form in 2008 by a young computer engineer named Nathan Eagle and, as of this coming June, based in Boston, will have 10,000 people working for it in Kenya. Txteagle does not rent office space for these workers, nor do the company’s officers interview them, or ever talk to most of them. And, in a sense, the labor that the Kenyan workforce does hardly seems like work. The jobs – short stretches of speech to be transcribed or translated into a local dialect, search engine results to be checked, images to be labeled, short market research surveys to be completed – come in over a worker’s own cellphone and the worker responds either by speaking into the phone or texting back the answer. The workers can be anyone with a cellphone – a secretary waiting for a bus, a Masai tribesman herding cattle, a student between classes, a security guard on a slow day, or one of Kenya’s tens of millions of unemployed. The jobs take at most a few minutes and pay a few cents each (payment is sent by cellphone as well), but a dedicated worker can earn a few dollars a day in a part of the world where that is a significant sum.

Models are moving from individual performance to models based on team performance.

Tough job for human resources? Absolutely, especially when we look at how we will pay people and how we define or measure performance. Many assumptions are under assault: the office-place of work, traditional work hours, people are paid for their hours/time and work-life.

Where does HR fit in?

Form A HR is about understanding how to combine a renewed strategic focus with effective delivery of transactional and administrative services as the key to HR’s next generation of service delivery models. These issues are critical to ensuring a fit for purpose HR function that can measure and demonstrate the value it adds.

Form B HR will progress into solutions model working to make the business more agile, looking at what can be changed, how that change will impact on the business and driving sustainability. The only way you can make fundamental change is by transforming the existing business especially as most people are working with a cost envelope over a three-five year business plan. 2009 was a tough year, business’s now understand that they have to find new and different ways of doing business, they cannot keep cutting budgets and restructuring. The reality is that too many businesses have cut through to the bone and will do well to fight off infection this year – more fire fighting. Besides, there can’t be much left to cut off until organisations become “drunk” – one step forward and two steps back …. or worse simply fall to the wayside until they sober up to their reality.

Form C HR is responsible for social business design to help organisations reinvent themselves, connect, buffer and calibrate socially in areas such as culture, generational & gender diversity, work-life, feedback mechanisms, etc. Type C HR will need to filter, intelligently manage and reuse this volume of knowledge in a meaningful way, on both a human and a systems level and re-infect it through multiple mechanisms into the system. Individuals all over the world are unable to synthesize and understand the vast amounts of information being generated by their organization. Everything becomes viral especially the change and the initial spread of infection will be fed into each system via the chosen employee champions.

I’ve mentioned in previous posts that the business environment is moving way too fast for HR, Marketing and Communication executives to keep driving the strategy in isolation while trying to achieve alignment between people, products and consumers. This is why you will read stories about Royal Dutch Shell’s marketing function leading some of the company’s recruitment strategies and why one of Central and Eastern Europe’s largest banks has recently contracted two of the largest branding and communications companies to create and develop their employer value proposition this year.

Social media is powering people’s need for self expression and is creating enormous changes in the way both brands as well as entire businesses function and as such the corporation and its brands cease to seem separate. More and more we will see that companies have to apply for skilled people to work for them – rather than applicants applying to work at an organisation.

Here is an nutty management read on The Grateful Dead!

The Grateful Dead Archive, scheduled to open soon at the University of California ……. But the biggest beneficiaries may prove to be business scholars and management theorists, who are discovering that the Dead were visionary geniuses in the way they created “customer value,” promoted social networking, and did strategic business planning.