During my recent blog posts, I have talked about the different clients HR has and what these clients expect from HR. HR is exposed to a variety of clients and these clients tend to be also very different in their thinking, their ambitions, their needs and wants, etc. That doesn’t make it easy for HR to collaborate with all of these stakeholders and also fulfill all different expectations. But before discussing these different stakeholder expectations in more detail, let’s focus on “What is HR about”.
HR or Human Resources as it is called is a pretty new concept, but the origins of that function are to be found in the Personnel Department and before that in actually Administration. This tells us many things:
- a) HR’s history is very diverse
- b) HR is an evolution and I suggest that this evolution is not over yet
- c) very different meanings and abouts are part of HR today
Fact is, that the origins of HR are nothing more than administration and paying employees. It actually started in Finance for many bits and was really focused on that. From there it evolved into the Personnel Department and had to deal with more than just Payroll and basic administration. And then came HR and today Strategic HR – wow, what an evolution. What a fantastic function… well, or not?
Let’s have a closer look at this: With each evolution only new, additional work and responsibility came to HR – nothing was ever taken away, so HR has become a “Gemischtwarenladen” as we say in Germany or in English a mixed bag. I would not question that any of the tasks and responsibilities of HR are unimportant – in fact the opposite. All of them are important, but also all of them are very different. There is pure administration of employee data, there is specialized payroll, there is benefits, there is performance management, there is organization effectiveness, there is… a multitude of very different responsibilities. Who ever has seen the process trees of for example HR and any other function recognizes immediately this multitude and also sees that HR is in fact very different to that part than other functions that go into Shared Services. Finance or other functions are more homogeneous whereas HR is very heterogeneous.
Now, how can this work? We have very different stakeholders, very different responsibilities and they all scream for specialized skills. I am saying – that cannot work. Specialization and focus is what should happen here. This idea is not new. Dave Ulrich has in the mid-90ies already started to work on this and was very successful in terms of HR functions being split into three distinct, focused areas. But – they are still in the most part HR and also the specialization did not always work out. The idea was new to HR back then and has definitely started something – but today, 20 years after, I feel that the next evolution – if this time not revolution – is necessary: New HR.
Stay tuned for more around New HR on this blog.
Chief HR Officer 