Ever since HR has graduated from an administrative role into more of a business-orientated one, practitioners have struggled to gain acceptance and credibility in the eyes of their business peers.
Ever since HR graduated from an administrative role into more of a business-orientated one, practitioners have struggled to gain acceptance and credibility in the eyes of their business peers.
The number of business managers and executives Human Resources magazine has spoken to over the years confirms this time and time again. They either have nothing good to say about HR (off the record for the most part), whereas if they’re on the record PR officers usually wade in to try and ‘massage the truth’.
Whether they’re old-school personnel officers or recent HR graduates, practitioners often struggle with the concept of needing to understand business imperatives. Some rail against the notion of having to understand profit & loss statements, while others simply don’t understand why line managers scratch their heads at some of their proposals.
No organisation is greater than the sum of its parts, and the HR function is in a pivotal role where it must first understand the organisation as a whole if it’s to make an effective difference on its own and actually contribute to the bottom line at the same time.
There is a fine balance in all of this. Libby Sartain, senior vice president of human resources and chief of People at Yahoo! in the US says that HR practitioners often complicate issues for themselves when they should simply focus on building a strong culture and brand that is in line with corporate objectives. Sartain is no newcomer to the practise of effective HR, having headed up HR at Southwest Airlines – a consistent leader in American employer of choice studies.
Closer to home, Ann Sherry, former group executive of People & Performance for Westpac Bank and now CEO of Westpac New Zealand, echoes Sartain’s comments. HR practitioners often shoot themselves in the foot by overcomplicating their work. Instead, they should simply focus on coming to a mutual understanding of business objectives, and focusing on the simple things that can make a difference, she says. (see page 12 for the full interview with Ann Sherry).
Many HR practitioners’ motives are benevolent enough – they say they just want to help people. While this is well and good, HR often struggles to translate this into effective outcomes for the business. Core to this is understanding what makes people tick.
Many people are unhappy in their jobs. If a workforce is unhappy, they are unmotivated. And if a workforce is unmotivated, then productivity is going to suffer in no small way. So what makes people happy in their jobs, that will contribute to a motivated and engaged workforce? The answer is not a simple one, but HR practitioners are in a better place to understand than most.
James Waldroop, associate director of career development at Harvard Business School and principal of a US career development firm, believes that by the time people reach early adulthood, their interest patterns are set for life. These are deeply embedded life interests, not just passing interests or hobbies. It’s proven that when people are able to match these life interests with their career, they’re likely to be a high performer.
However many people aren’t sure of what their own life interests are, while others are simply happy to be the ‘worker bees’ in an organisation and not be the high flyers. It’s very clear that HR practitioners still need to be ‘people people’ in order to try and understand what motivates people on the life interest level.
Relating this to employee engagement through a meaningful job is not something that comes easily, and tying this back to driving business outcomes is harder still. But not impossible. This is a simplistic analysis of a challenging task, and it’s clear that we still have a long way to go in our organisations in terms of providing both people with a higher purpose at work, and subsequently getting the most productivity out of them.
