Due to its notorious technical deficit, many of the areas specialized in HR management have been reducing its natural professional space, undermining its reputation to extremes that could be justified by its progressive dismantling or disappearance as a strategic management unit.
Their functions turned into a summation of simple and routine tasks and activities, as well as their intolerable slowness, indifference and lack of technical sensitivity to perceive their authentic role have significantly tarnished them, almost forgetting the important work they carried out with singular and proven professionalism.. Let us remember that, with the name of industrial relations, they were pillars in the conflictive fields in which labor affairs and personnel administration were developed, contributing, under high risk conditions, to achieving social peace, which had been so diminished in the past decades..
Now these areas, delayed in time and some of them converted into HR offices or managements, are mistakenly concentrating their activities on routine, paperwork and obsessive monitoring of compliance with their processes, rules and procedures *; assuming a sanctioning and draconian spirit in these aspects, relegating other responsibilities of greater importance to the background, such as: creativity and innovation to improve the service, the implementation of good policies and practices in the management of human resources, sustained strategic coherence with institutional purposes, etc.
It has not yet been understood that the effectiveness of public services and the correct administration of available resources are valued for their contribution to the satisfaction of collective needs, not for the effort, dedication and emphasis on the administrative process. An efficient management of human potential is equivalent to concrete and verifiable results with whose added value is effectively responded to the demands of the recipients or final actors (stakeholders).
These Offices that assume responsibility for the management of human resources have the challenge - if they want to retain their professional rank - to recover the leadership and strategic hierarchy that due to the nature and breadth of their functions corresponds to them, but it will be impossible for them to achieve this. committed if the officials obliged to guarantee the change act by intuition and reaction and insist on continuing to be disconnected from what is substantial in the modern management of HR, persistently privileging the paperwork process and the inflexible control of the normative and regulatory aspects, leaving marginal or as accessory the priority and substantive.
Faced with this panorama, it is then appropriate to have suitable references who guarantee to a high degree the good management of human resource management. Ensuring with its proper implementation the best practices and personnel policies as well as the necessary combination of managerial capacity with social commitment, allowing us to properly resolve legitimate citizen demands.
With this concern, we consider it useful and advantageous to learn about two excellent and very important works prepared by the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) and by the Latin American Center for Development Administration - United Nations Program (CLAD-NU).
The first of the IDB "Analytical Framework for the Institutional Diagnosis of Civil Service Systems" is a diagnosis that incorporates the most modern guidelines in human resources and provides valuable methodological instruments that lead to knowing the current and real situation of HR, identifying its degree of efficiency and effectiveness as well as their level of involvement with the mission and vision of the organization.
The second is the "Iberoamerican Charter of Public Service" approved by the V Iberoamerican Conference of Ministers of Public Administration and State Reform, backed by the XIII Iberoamerican Summit of Heads of State and Government.
This Charter defines the bases that make up a professional and effective system of public function, a key piece for democratic governance and for good public management, inspired by criteria linked to the preeminence of people for the proper functioning of public services, the professionalism, flexibility in the organization and management of public employment, in ethical principles, honesty, transparency and scrupulousness in the management of public resources
Both have been successfully applied in different South American countries (Uruguay, Chile, Venezuela, Argentina etc.).
You can find them on the IDB web pages. Regional Policy Dialogue and at CLAD - United Nations.
Likewise, to reinforce and / or expand our knowledge in public matters, we recommend the following readings: “A New Public Management for Latin America” produced by CLAD and “A New Public Management for the Modernization of the State” by Bernardo Kliksberg (UNDP-CLAD)
(*) "The Miniaturization of the role of personnel management in the public sector…" G.Maraví M.
