Welcome back to Chief HR Office – in my last post I have started to talk about a concept named “New HR” and I have promised to further elaborate on that. And today I would like to do so. As laid out in my last post, HR is a total mixed bag of activities and before we can talk about New HR, we need to align and get clear on what HR is about today. In other words, what are the areas HR is busy with today?
So, let’s start with the basic things:
- HR is responsible for all employee related data and it’s administration
- HR is often responsible for time & attendance data
- HR is responsible for paying employees
- HR is responsible for setting up and managing the rules and policies about how employees will be treated and what employees are allowed and not allowed to do
- HR is responsible for all contractual data and documents with/ for employees
- HR is often the first point of contact for employee for any policy or unspecific work related question
So, this was the basic stuff, now let’s get to the next level:
- HR is responsible for training employees
- HR is responsible for paying employees right
- HR is responsible for retaining employees and attracting the right new ones
- HR is responsible for engaging employees and keep them engaged
- HR is also responsible to manage employees out of the organization
And from the other perspective:
- HR is responsible for understanding and meeting business’ workforce needs
- HR is responsible for building effective teams and, the bigger picture, an effective company (organization structure)
- HR is responsible to support or even manage any kind of company reorganization
Not to forget, HR is also responsible to manage two important stakeholders that ONLY HR is managing: works councils and unions.
The lists by no means want to be exhaustive, but they illustrate an important finding. What we can see and learn from this list (again) is that HR is a total mixed bag and that various responsibilities lay with HR. How is one department or even one Leadership team supposed to manage all of this? And this from different perspectives: type of work, necessary skill-set, stakeholder involved, etc.
I believe that this is a question which should be re-raised and where Ulrich is no longer the final solution, but we need to raise it to the next level. More about that in one of my next posts.
Chief HR Officer 