Do we need to rethink HR?

I had the pleasure of visiting ADPReThink last week and enjoyed a fantastic presentation by Marcus Buckingham from the ADP Research Institute. You can find his research here. He has shared his latest research about employee sentiment, engagement,  performance and retention. The new twist that I haven‘t seen before is that he also assessed an HR Experience Score which was really interesting to see and understand. I will leave it to you to read more details about it here.

The interesting outcome is that this HR Experience Score is ver strongly related to Engagement and retention – in fact, 51% of the variance of HR Experience can be explained by Engagement. This means that we are much more important as a function than we probably give us credit for. I find this an amazing finding while at the same time it makes me pause and look back to what we did with our function in the recent years.

The problem

We basically reduced ourselves into an operational arm that focuses on efficiency and effectiveness in delivering HR services and a business partnering arm that partners with senior leaders to review and define (people) strategy as well as help managers bringing this strategy into practice. – ok, we also have the CoE arm, but this one plays anyway behind the scenes and a regular employee only sees the results of this through the HR services and the business partnering.

But…what Marcus found is that in fact, employees want more than just services delivered. They look for much more in HR – and if they don‘t get this, the HR Experience is low and with it Engagement and retention. Employees want support from HR, want to have a trusted partner in HR, someone that cares about their career, well-being, performance and progress – outside the direct work environment that is manager controlled. Wow, employees want an HR person that knows and cares about them. Now that I write it, it is not so absurd. But still – did anyone consider this in recent years?

Reconsider what HR is about

This epiphany let me reconsider how we should think about HR and how we should reconsider the actual tasks we want HR delivering – and HOW we deliver these tasks. Don‘t get me wrong, I don‘t want to turn time back to the heavily staffed HR department of generalists. I still believe that these times are over. But I believe we need to reconsider a new role in our set-up. We should one more time look at other functions how they treat and care for their stakeholders, their consumers, their customers. The one that comes to my mind particularly here is sales and how they care about their customers and prospects.

ERM – Employee Relationship Management

We should install a new process of Employee Relationship Management. A process where we are not reactively delivering a service that an employee wants or has a need for, like requiring a verification letter or an update to their personal data, but a process that is part pro-active and mainly future focused. A process where we as HR create a relationship with our employees built on trust and common goals. Different from what we built in the past, we need to be again a function with a face, a function with a clear go to person for each employee. And this person should be a familiar name to the employee – and not the „next agent that is available“.
We need to change our approach and approachability. But not through installing local, F2F HR generalists that are again available for each and everything an employee wants – but something new, something different in line with our current aspiration as I believe this is a twist and not a reinvention of what we have been doing. I will talk about it more in my next post. – but what are your thoughts?