Hello Dr. Ashish,
It is actually a sad fact that the HR department is always sidelined compared to other departments in most companies.
I do not know the actual reasons about this, but from some discussions that I had whilst in college and during my internship with one of the reputed firms, I happen to trace down a few reasons -
1) HR is observed as a cost center as we are to device some or other motivational things which may have some expense.
2) Training, Recruiting, Engaging, Payroll etc is HR's responsibility and these does have their own cost.
3) The efforts of HR is a soft skill and can't be measured in factual manner as the finance or marketing department does. They can claim an increase of 10% or 50% in the turnover or sales or profits. How are we to claim we engaged 50% more employees compared to previous year(s)
In order to change the management's view to HR, it is important to start measuring our work as much as possible. We too will have to speak numbers. We need to be sure that we are doing something to give to the company. We first, ourselves should be confident that yes, our efforts is contributing to the company's vision and mission.
As a result of this, my summer internship project was to study about HR Metrics and trying to develop it. I wrote about this and got my article on HR Metrics published with IIM-Shillong's magazine. (Here's the link for your kind perusal)
http://iimsushr.files.wordpress.com/...ruary-2012.pdf
Scroll down to pg 16 (of PDF which conincides to pg 13 of the booklet)
Apart from this, I would love to hear from seniors about their idea in making HR department as respectable as other.