Human Resources

After close to 20 years of hopeful rhetoric about becoming "strategic partners" with a "seat at the table" where the business decisions that matter are made, most human resources professionals aren't really there. They don’t have the seat, and the table is locked inside a conference room to which they have no key. HR people are, for most practical purposes, neither strategic nor leaders.

 

Why are annual performance appraisals so time-consuming and very often serving no practical purpose? Why is HR so often the henchman for the CFO, finding ever-more ingenious ways to cut benefits and hack at payroll? In a 2005 survey by Hay Group consultants, just 40% of employees commended their companies for retaining high-quality workers. Just 41% agreed that performance evaluations were fair. Only 58% rated their job training as favorable. Most said they had few opportunities for advancement and that they didn't know, in any case, what was required to move up. Most telling of all, only about half of the workers below the managerial level believed their companies took a genuine interest in their well-being. It’s no wonder then that people hate HR. Why does such a condition exist? Why is HR more often than not perceived as not adding any real value to the organization? 

                                                    

Looking for answers to these questions, we came across the following arguments by people. People enter the field by choice and with the best of intentions, but for the wrong reasons. They like working with people, and they want to be helpful and noble and these reasons thoroughly ticks off some HR gurus. "When people come to me and say, 'I want to work with people,' I say, 'Good, go be a social worker,' " says Arnold Kanarick, who has headed human resources until recently, at Bear Stearns, "HR isn't about being a dogooder. It's about how you get the best and brightest people and raise the value of the firm". Most human-resources managers aren't particularly interested in, or even equipped for, doing business. And in a business, that's a serious problem. As guardians of a company's talent, HR has to understand how people serve corporate objectives. Instead, "business acumen is the single biggest factor that HR professionals lack today," says Anthony J. Rucci, executive vice president at Cardinal Health Inc., a big health-care supply distributor. Human resources can readily provide data on the number of people it hired, the percentage of performance evaluations completed, and the extent to which employees are satisfied or not with their benefits. But only rarely does it link any of those metrics to business performance. How many HR people really view themselves as being responsible for a company’s most valued asset, its human capital? A very select few. Most think their job is to choose HMO (Health Maintenance Organization) plans; plan the company picnic, and do all the low brow tasks that no one else wants to do.

 

HR undoubtedly could play a major role in building the human capital of companies and developing the skills and talents of workers. But they don’t. This is the biggest reason why people hate HR: for all it should be and isn’t. Is this situation unworkable? How can we change this mindset among employees about HR and become a true strategic partner to the business?