In one of my earlier posts (actually from quite a while ago already), I have laid out how complex HR has become and what kind of different asks, topics, areas of responsibility came into HR and bloated this function. It is massive and not everything that was placed into HR belongs into HR – but that is a story I have already written. Today I want to focus on a different issue with a similar outcome – topics and responsibilities that HR decided to take on, decided it needs to take on.
How many HR policies do you have in your organization? How long do you need to read through all of them? – or what can you do without asking HR for permission today as a people manager? I guess not much? I just recently had a conversation with some of the leading HR SaaS vendors and what they call leading processes. These leading processes are still a self-fulfilling prophecy about what HR wants to hear, wants to do and believes is responsible for instead of rethinking people processes and transforming them in to the 21st century.
Let me give you an example: Organization Management. Leading practice is supposed to still be that an HR Business Partner or similar checks and approves a new position that a manager creates. How can that be? – why is HR involved in this process in any other way than the pure back-office to make sure that all next steps are triggered correctly? Why does HR believes it owns the people costs? Does in your organization Finance approve every expense that a manager has? Does Finance own the money of the company – or do they manage it only?
I strongly believe that although we have transformed HR probably more than any other function (this topic is going on since 1997 when Dave Ulrich started all of this) in the recent years, we did not truly change anything:
- We have implemented Shared Service Centers to take on the back-office – but we did not revolutionize the back-office processes itself…
- We have installed self-services “to empower people manager” – but in the end we just ask them to do the admin work of completing forms…
- We have done away with HR Generalists and installed HR Business Partners – but in the end we just renamed them, did not change the what, how and why of their work
- We have saved millions of $ in the HR function – but today less HR people do more work and we still did not truly enable the main part of this Transformation Business Case which is the workforce
Of course, my above statements are not true to 100% of the companies and HR functions out there, but I am sure that at least two statements are true for the majority of HR departments. So what are we doing now? – is this what companies want and need? Is this what employees and people managers want and need?
Ok, let’s not really ask the “want” part of the questions, and focus on the “need”. We as HR need to scrutinize each and every HR process and have to ask us two questions:
- Does that HR process and/ or policy add any value to the company or the workforce? – and if the answer is no, just stop it, cut it out
- If the answer is yes, ask the question: Does the way we execute this process differentiate us from our competition? – and if the answer is no, just cut it out and ask a specialized best of breed vendor to take it on for you
And everything that is then still left in HR and in your company: Simplify, streamline and ask what HR’s value add in that process is. I tell you, most processes will just run fine without HR interference. I am myself an HR Pro and I believe that sometimes we take us and our function to serious and important. Let’s jointly cut it out and simplify our, our colleagues’ and the whole company’s life every day. Let’s be only where we need to be, not where we want to be.
Chief HR Officer 