What’s the point of HR?
Useless, isn’t it?
If you’re working in HR, don’t try to google any negative keywords with those 2 letters, or you might stumble upon phrases like: “why are HR departments so useless?”, “HR is a useless job, just admit it!”, “why HR is useless and you should never trust them”, or this article in Forbes: “it’s time for companies to fire their Human Resources department”.
I must admit that, during the first 10 years or so of my professional life, I didn’t have a particuarly good opinion of HR either, as I remember an HR director more concerned with organizing the Christmas party than addressing essential matters like training requests.
In order to get a better understanding of this situation, I reached out to our AI overlord and asked ChatGPT what the most frequent negative keywords associated with HR are. I thought I’d get a handful but got a full list of 15 that I can’t help but share, so pick up your favorite one:
Unresponsive
Inconsistent
Bureaucratic
Ineffective
Insensitive
Nontransparent
Unfair
Dysfunctional
Unethical
Discriminatory
High Turnover
Poor Communication
Lack of Development Opportunities
Outdated Policies
Overly Strict
Administrating employee-related processes
So what should we make of all this? A mirror image of that list and those negative articles can help us understand what we hope to get from HR and why there is this negative perception. Let’s start with the beginning. Already in the 19th century, we saw the two main components of HR emerge: one part was to take care of employees, with a positivist vision for the time that happy employees would work better. Another part was to handle the related administration: recruitment, payroll, and managing grievances.
This hasn’t changed at all in our 21st century. HR isn’t called “personel administration” anymore but those two aspects are present. So, what do employees typically expect from HR?
- going through a fair, quick and transparent recruitment and onboarding process
- getting paid on time and ensuring the company is compliant to local legislations (eg on time management, employee safety, …)
- getting trained to ensure my skills remain constantly up to date to maintain my employability
- receiving new opportunities and promotions as I’m staying longer in the organization
- being treated respectfully and fairly if my job is being made redundant
All these expectations revolve around well-structured processes, or do they?
The great confusion
The issue is that with the name change from employee administration to HR came a strong misunderstanding from employees. Everyone understands that an admin department is in charge of handling processes smoothly for the benefit of the company. But if, as a member of staff, I reach out to a department called “human resources”, I am led to believe that they will support me if I’m facing challenges within the organization. This is obviously not the case. An HR department is still in charge of handling people-related processes for the company, from hiring to firing or retiring. This confusion became even greater as research on the positive financial impact of employee engagement and motivation started to emerge and continue to be successfully published today. The Gallup survey for example lists many impactful outcomes of higher engagement, including customer satisfaction, sales performance, productivity and therefore profitability.
As an employee, I am led to understand that it is the company’s interest to take good care of me so that I become more engaged, therefore more productive. In reality, this is a huge misconception. First because what applies to an entire organization may not apply to my particular case. Second because employee engagement isn’t directly related to HR processes. As explained in this other Gallup article, “The greatest cause of a workplace engagement program’s failure is this: Employee engagement is widely considered “an HR thing.” If we look at what creates engagement, there is little that is directly the result of HR processes, as we can see from this list of engagement drivers from KornFerry:
- “a strong strategic compass”, or to put it differently: a sense of purpose and being useful
- “Abundant growth opportunities”, including an impactful learning strategy that takes into account projects and on-the-job training, as well as a strong internal recruitment strategy
- “A sense of worth with effective rewards”, in particular with a fair compensation strategy
- “A measure of employee autonomy”, so no micromanaging boss!
- “A supportive and inclusive community”, or in other words an organization that respects all employees without prejudice
The real purpose of HR: creating value for employees
As a marketing professional, I strongly believe that HR should learn from marketing. Historically considered as a cost center, this department has achieved a complete transformation over the last 20 years to become a strong part of the revenue generating team, with its focus on what is the real purpose of marketing: creating value for clients.
The analogy is obvious for HR: they should be the value creators for employees. The same way value creation for clients generates revenues for the organization, value creation for employees will do the same through engagement, with all the associated benefits listed here. This value creation will need to happen at all stages of the employee lifecycle, from sourcing, recruitment, pre-boarding and onboarding, to learning and development, internal mobility, project management, succession planning and even in the case of a redundancy. As Josh Bersin explains, “in business, employees are an asset, not a cost”. This is not for some charitable reasons but simply because, as French Renaissance humanist Jean Bodin wrote, “there is no wealth but people” (il n’est de richesses que d’hommes).
