Do Human Resources add value?

As I am in the profession I am swayed to believe that HR adds huge value to organisations, however, this is not always the case.  Malcolm Howard, Chairman of Maris Interiors was recently cited in a CIPD debate to have stated;

“I don’t need someone with a HR title sat in a room working out policies and coming up with plans and appraisals. Most HR managers are useless and don’t understand business needs or people needs and rarely do they have any power or authority to change anything anyway. In running a business you have a responsibility to your staff – it’s as simple as that and I don’t need a HR person to tell me how to do that.”

Ironically, Malcolm Howard points resonate strongly with me, I believe that if the Managers do not manage their people it will have detrimental effect on the company.  Not all managers are in the position where they can carry out this role without help, and HR Managers, if good enough, will look to equip the Managers with the skills they require to be self sufficient.  In my opinion, HR will add the most value when they are able to influence the company strategy, implementing the requirements before the need and ensuring the business makes the most of the people now and in the future.

I believe that we are seeing a new evolution of the HR function and indications of the market show that this function has to add value through sound business acumen skills coupled with the traditional HR role.

What do you think?

Comments

[James H]

Having worked in high technology companies for 20 years I have seen increasing and ever more successful examples where bottom up, self-organising, flat hierarchy approaches trump the more traditional ‘management’ and HR practices every time. In many parts of the IT industry, agility and velocity are key to keeping relevant and competitive and managers need to understand when it is best to trust, respect and ‘move out of the way’ rather than apply command and control style management and ‘carrot and stick’ HR. Compare and contrast Google’s agile approaches with Microsoft. Microsoft is looking increasingly slow, bureaucratic and middle management heavy.
Beyond IT, and an admittedly more extreme example, is the approach taken by Ricardo Semler http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ricardo_Semler.

Personally, I’ve seen more examples of HR making a hash of it or being largely irrelevant than ‘getting it’ strategically and adding value, so a change in outlook and emphasis would be welcome. It’s similar to the pain internally facing IT departments have gone through in becoming more externally aware, strategic and focused on delivering business value.

[Natalie Rodway]

I actually agree with both of you. I believe that we are seeing a new evolution of the HR function, one which realises the mutual organisational and employee gains of flatter organisational design and more autonomous working conditions. The argument states that employees are more likely to be satisfied, engaged and thus more productive if they have a chance to influence their work (see an article by Keith Sisson, the ex Head of Strategy Development at ACAS, called 'Response to Mike Emmott'). With this in mind, it needs to be the strategic role of HR to implement such structures and ensure that managers within a flat hierarchy (with many more direct reports than perhaps they would have had in a bureaucracy) are equipped with the skills to develop their team as far as possible, in order that they can work as autonomously and effectively as possible.

[James H]

Good points. I'd also add to this that collaborative technologies, such as SharePoint, (nice of me to do their service promotion for them ;)) offer the potential to help facilitate flatter hierarchies and more autonomous working. Technology itself is often not the panacea it's made out to be in many scenarios but if collaborative technologies are implemented in a human focused and strategic way then productivity gains can be very significant.

[James H]

You're my favourite HR person ever Natalie, so you can take my earlier comments with a large pinch of salt :)

[James H]

You're my favourite HR person ever Natalie, so you can take my earlier comments with a large pinch of salt :)