The human resources manager, the gatekeeper to employment in many firms, has long been seen as a “touchy-feely" role — “just a social club member,” said Ruslan Ilyasov, the head of HR at Russian consumer electronics chain, Eldorado. Over the last two years this reputation has been altered, as HR directors “have become highly accountable for bottom-line results,” he explained.

Ilyasov has been at Eldorado for two years and even in this time the company’s HR has become more “streamlined” as features such as a shared service center between all the regional operations and a centralized payroll have been introduced. Company-specific events, such as a new shareholder structure, have partly influenced the changes. But it was Russia’s economic crisis in particular that shook up the role of HR within the firm, as the management was made flatter, headcount optimized and outsourcing support increased, he said.

For many companies, personnel adjustments have been key to their survival strategy over the last 12 to 18 months. “HR directors have been critical to the restructuring, which has seen a reduction in the number of management layers,” said Ilyasov.

In taking an active role in this process the function of HR managers has changed. “HR employees have become more like partners to operational managers in the search for effective solutions to personnel management,” explained Nina Demyanova, corporate communications manager at Vimpelcom. These changes are down to new principles that Vimpelcom identified as key to achieving integration in response to the crisis, Demyanova said.

As well as the establishment of a unified system for HR functions, the new company principles have helped the HR management and operational management work together along new lines.

HR staff’s increased involvement requires greater knowledge of their firm’s activities. “They have had to get heavily involved in the economics of the company, as they require an understanding of the business and how also to make an impact on the company’s performance,” explained Ilyasov.

A mid-2009 report from the Economist Intelligence Unit wrote that “from 2005 to 2008 it was not uncommon to hear regional directors and country managers complaining that they spend anywhere between 40 to 60 percent of their time on HR-related matters. This has changed during the crisis. HR managers have picked up the slack, having been sucked into overall crisis management, while at the same time trying to build a strategy for the long-term.”

While Ilyasov said he agreed in part with this assessment of the crisis’ influence on HR at Eldorado, he also said there has been increasing emphasis put on the idea that HR managers should spend time ‘in the field’. “Our HR managers now spend about two thirds of their time in stores, where they act as both management ambassadors and feedback providers — messengers.”

Other companies in Russia have reported changes to HR functions since the start of the crisis, although not necessarily in the same way. “Now we spend much less time and resources on HR matters, because the crisis practically put an end to competition among employers and increased competition among employees,” said Margarita Simonyan, editor-in-chief of state television broadcaster, RT.

While this removal of emphasis on HR at RT may only highlight basic structural differences between a state-funded broadcaster and a privately owned consumer goods store, there is a common concern for the broadening of skills among employees. “Over the past few years, managers of various companies, including all major TV channels, were constantly saying that the main problem in their work was the lack of skilled personnel,” Simonyan said.

Eldorado’s Ilyasov said that he one day hoped that separate HR managers will disappear altogether as their roles are combined with others’: “this probably won’t happen in my life-time, but I would like line managers in large companies to absorb the role of HR, like any good line manager should do. In small companies of five, 10 or 15 people there is no HR manager.”