Anja Schaefer from Deutshce Bank Addresses HRM & LR Students at TISS-Mumbai

Anja Schaefer from Deutshce Bank Addresses HRM & LR Students at TISS-Mumbai

Anja Schaefer, Vice President HR Business Partner for Private & Business Clients for Deutshce Bank (DB) has grown along with DB. Being a part of the bank's HR activities for 17 years to date (from the time she was 18), she has seen the various trends of HR come and go.

Today, she is seemingly able to tell apart the ones that will stay. 28th July 2007, when she decided to enlighten with her thoughts on the subject - "New Age HR: Are We Ready for it?" - the spanking new batch of the HRM & LR Programme greeted the opportunity with great enthusiasm.

Anja began her presentation by asking the class what it believed the outside world thought of HR. She nodded in affirmation and understanding when there were answers on the relative unimportance of HR in the public eye. It led the class to conclude that the opinion about HR being ineffective and lacking in business understanding is a global phenomenon; at the least in Germany, where Anja hails from. She summed up the feeling in the line - Should we do away with HR? She traced the change of HR's responsibility and scope over the decades, beginning from the 19th century to the present; from being the solver of worker problems to being in the second phase of business management. After highlighting the fundamental HR issues, she paraphrased the above question as - What should we do with HR?

She stressed on the critical business challenges facing HR to explain why HR is more important than ever today. She spoke of globalization, changing demographics and technology, the desire of profitability through growth and the omnipresent factor of change. She further explained these through the Ulrich Model, currently being studied in the classroom, thus, making the subject more relevant to the students. She said that a transformation has to take place in HR to change the prevalent thinking about the function's roles. After setting forward the ways in which HR could do this, namely, credibility, integrated understanding of business and management, deep influencing skills and being accepted into the managerial team, she said that there were a few companies in the world that had understood the same and had integrated it into their daily management - DB being one of them. She explained the DB HR model to show how HR strategy is lined with management agenda and introduced the concept of the 4 Cs - culture, career, change and cost - used to implement the HR strategy.

Anja then told the class about the core competencies that will be required to deal with the dynamic world, how one should identify the same within the organization and close the gap, if any. She enlightened the class on preparing themselves for this future role as HR managers by developing emotional awareness, social awareness, self management and relationship management. Knowing that an example would help the class assimilate the understanding of such skills, she took up a core HR competency of influencing people. She explained the process involved in influencing people through a diagram, and finally explained how to reach a mutual conclusion.

Finally, Anja emphasized that the way forward lay in the transformation of HR and said that the change is already being mirrored in the growing number of companies that have begun to consider HR an integral part of the executive team.

Concluded.

Contributed by -
Aparna Sekhar,
TISS, Mumbai.

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