From a business and economic perspective, Africa will be what China was 20-25 years or India 10-15 years back. Logistics and infrastructure, a pro-business economic and regulatory environment, maturity of the banking industry, ease of acquiring capital investment, and human resources remain some of the tough challenges for businesses in any growing country or region. While many of these challenges are completely dependent on external developments, there are some which depend on how businesses handle it. And one such challenge is human resource management.
HR Consulting, Human Resources Consulting, HR Consulting Services
HR Challenges in Africa
In many countries in Africa, the challenges in Human Resources consulting range from personal attributes like leadership and managerial qualities and abilities to strategic and process-related aspects in recruitment and other HR functions. The challenges may sound similar and universal but they carry a localized impact.
Leadership and Managerial Skills
The need for authentic, ethical, and value-based leadership and managerial qualities is a highly sought-after attribute for business leaders and managers. The HR & IR managers of a company have to deal directly with the employees in employee-organization related matters. In many ways, the HR department represents the top leadership and the internal image of a company. What makes this task difficult is that, apart from possessing excellent relationship-building abilities, the HR managers also need to remain acquainted with the cultural, religious, and other local values and practices prevalent in a region. This shows a huge opportunity for Human Resources consulting (HR consulting) businesses.
Recruitment and Talent Management
With the impact of globalization and technology, job skills and knowledge requirements now change more frequently. This has compelled companies to keep a tab on their recruitment strategies and processes.
In countries with job scarcity, recruiting often turns out to be a massive task with over flooding of applications. In such situations, the quality of recruitment can be severely impaired without the aid of a recruitment software application.
In job markets with a scarcity of adequately skilled and educated candidates, it becomes difficult for companies to fill up managerial positions. The problem gets further compounded when there’s a dearth of good job portals and job counselling services.
Sometimes the lack of university-corporate linkages also limits businesses in having access to qualified pools of candidates. Businesses must see that there are students studying abroad who may wish to go back to their home countries if they get good opportunities.
Employee Retention
Job dissatisfaction is a serious obstacle in employee retention. Talented, qualified, productive, and career-conscious professionals seek more than salary packages and job security to stay on. Many experts on global human resources consultancy misread this leading to ineffective remedies being adopted. A growing number of employees now seek able leadership, innovation, work-life balance, healthy work environment, more meaningful responsibilities, the scope of personal and career growth and development, etc. This shows a huge demand for HR consulting.
Embracing change
As barriers of international trade and business break owing to the efforts of the governments, globalization, emerging technologies, disruptive business models, and rising eCommerce, businesses now will have to gear themselves up to foresee and embrace change. And a big challenge here will be organizational change management.
How YRC can help you through its HR Consulting Services
The external business environment will always be subject to change and challenges. The variables in the equation will always remain dynamic. What businesses can do with strategic planning is build an agile organizational system to ensure that it remains conducive with its external environment for smooth business operations. We, at YRC, as a provider of human resources consulting services, seek to help your business build and maintain a robust organization. Here’s a glimpse of how we do it.
A well-planned organization design plays a vital role in keeping a business systematic and orderly. Our HR consulting services experts will help you design the structural framework of your business enterprise mapping the departments, identifying the required roles and positions, establishing the authority-responsibility relationships, maintaining the principles of command chain and span of control, defining the flow of work and formal routes of communication, etc.
By planning for your manpower requirements, you will be able to effectively ensure that your business consistently has the requisite workforce across departments and organizational levels. But that is not limited to your immediate requirements. You will also have to plan for the future. That is why succession planning is necessary. Through HR Consulting Services, our experts will assist you with staff analysis and succession planning. YRC will help you ensure that your enterprise obliterates the possibilities of demand-supply gaps in your workforce requirements. This will also help you in cultivating leadership within the organization.
In order to maintain order and consistency in HR processes and activities, it becomes important to define the policies and processes. It covers the SOPs, practices, rules and regulations, code of conduct, criteria, regulatory requirements, etc. governing how HR processes will be carried out and the conduct of the employees as part of an organization. With defined HR processes, your HR department will be able to carry out their duties and responsibilities with ease and comprehension. This will also lend transparency and comprehensiveness to your employee-related organizational policies enhancing the scope of better compliance. Our experts will help you define the HR policies and map the HR processes of your enterprise.
A universal truth is that change is always resisted by most of the people. It breaks the status quo which most people do not wish for. The same is true when it comes to bringing a business-level or organizational change. Majority of employees are likely to resist it and those in favour will soon follow suit to maintain harmony with the mainstream. Sometimes it can be difficult even for the big HR consulting firms to manage change in their own organizations. The support and willingness of the employees and the change management methodology are vital to introduce any organization-wide transformation. Keeping the nuances and requirements in mind, we follow a planned and curated approach in crafting and implementing any change management process.
We are a boutique retail consulting firm. To know more about our HR consulting services, drop us a message and we will get back to you.