In writing this last opinion piece for the year, I hark back to my first opinion of 2005: What makes a good HR professional? This piece examined the trend of line managers moving in and out of the HR function
In writing this last opinion piece for the year, I hark back to my first opinion of 2005: What makes a good HR professional? This piece examined the trend of line managers moving in and out of the HR function.
HR can play an invaluable support role in many organisations, but it has to know its place and take time to learn the business. It’s vital that line managers know the business, but this has not always been the case for HR professionals who come from the administrative/transactional school. Times have changed. As Harry Houston, general manager of Form-Rite Australia, writes in this edition’s opinion, the only reason for the existence of an HR department (or any other department for that matter) is to support the achievement of the organisation’s objectives.
There seems to be a growing divide between HR professionals who ‘get it’(or who choose to ‘get it’) and those who don’t. Those HR professionals who do get it stand to benefit on a number of levels. Not only do they increase their skills and business nous, but also their value on the HR job market. While it might seem a bad thing to be a HR professional who doesn’t get it, this could be just a reflection of the evolution of the HR function itself.
HR at the moment is doing double duty. About 100 years ago (give or take a decade or two), there was a fundamental split in the accounting world which gave birth to the finance department. Accounting is transactional, finance is strategic. The same distinction drawn between these two departments is now occurring in the HR department. The transactional HR function is responsible for administrative work and keeping cost per transaction as low as possible. The more strategic HR function is responsible for human capital management and more transformational work.
Change is inevitable and inescapable. It’s probably going to take another decade or more for the split between the two functions to be complete. And it’s going to take both kinds of HR professionals to successfully give birth (albeit painfully) to the two distinct functions.
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