Effective leadership is putting first things first. Effective management is discipline, carrying it out~ Stephen R Covey.

This morning, I came across this thought provoking quote as part of my regular email digest from Forbes. This made me think effective management is now a necessity for an organization. For the development of an organization, the following resources are very essential.

• Capital aka financial resource
• Technology aka technical know-how and
• People aka Human Resource

There is no denial in the fact that Human Resource plays a key role in any organization. In fact, all the important aspects of a resource, like an Employee, are managed and controlled in this arena. Now the big question is, are organizations doing enough to give more powers to their resources for their over-all growth?

Towers Watson, a leading professional services company, has recently reported that technology is a critical component in an organization’s ability to meet its talent management objectives. Yet a handful, probably fewer than 10 percent of the organizations are using effective talent management software to empower their management processes. In this scenario, it is very critical that organizations start focusing more on empowering their human resource. Having said that, this would be just easier for an organization to define and align their organizational purpose, accurately measure the right parameters, being able report the maximum percentage of performance reviews and focus on Employee strengths.

• Attendance Management – This would help in proper monitoring of the employee timings, thereby ensuring more productivity.
• Leaves Management – As a competitive organization, one needs to have a reliable Leave management system to manage employee absence, calculate leave accruals and make payments accurately.
• erformance Appraisal System – More often than not, organizations tend to struggle with the appraisal systems. Lack of a proper system will only lead to chaos and time-consuming discussions during the appraisal period.
• Bug Tracker System – Having an organized and centralized bug-tracker system will help the organizations manage and track their projects.
• Tasks Management – Task lists make managing Team projects simple. This will help keep track of progress throughout the task life cycle.

Many organizations profess about “strategic HR” or EmpowerHR, but all in vain. At the grass root level, they are still a “support” function, merely confined to paperwork with lots of dependencies. In my opinion, empowering the HR with more discretionary powers , at the strategic level, would be akin to empowering organizations.

(The author is associated with product based startup eSwiftSoftware. Sayeed conceptualized and engineered the product “EmpowerHR” . This is an operative package for controlling the HR operations. EmpowerHR package consists of various connected tasks such as maintaining ‘Employee Data’, ‘Attendance’, ‘Leave Management’, ‘Pay-slip Generation’, ‘Reporting Tools’, ‘Security’, ‘Dashboards’, and ‘Swift Search’. EmpowerHR was nominated for the Best Startup Product Category at the annual HYSEA summit in 2014. He can be reached at sayeed@eSwiftSoftware.com for further queries)