Tuesday, 07-02-2012
Posted on 2009-04-07 in Training
Why is HR Still so Unloved?
Why is HR Still so Unloved?
Paul Kearns explores how ‘Evidence-Based HR’ might finally get HR out of the dock?HR has always felt beleaguered and has developed an ability to gaze at its own navel that is legendary and unsurpassed by any other management discipline. It commands little respect, feels unloved, unappreciated and yet fervently believes it has a very important part to play. Indeed, it convinces itself that it is already playing a very important part and that if only it could, somehow, produce some data to prove this, it would finally gain the recognition it craves. It is this lack of evidence, they believe, that is holding them back. I say ‘they’ because, as an HR professional myself, of some 30 years standing I have never personally felt the need to ‘prove’ that I make a difference, simply because I would never do anything that wasn’t clearly designed to make a measurable difference in the first place.
Yet HR can no more measure its own impact, in isolation, than any other function, be it sales, R&D, operations, accounts or even customer service. Organisations just don’t work like that; even though there are plenty of Sales Directors and R&D heads that will try to convince that the whole edifice is entirely dependent on their own particular department. This was always patent nonsense and HR should never have let itself be drawn into playing this game.
This does not mean that we should not be interested in producing evidence of what makes HR effective. It’s just that there seems little point collecting conventional HR data (HR costs, recruitment times, absence, staff turnover, disciplinaries, successful tribunals) to try and demonstrate it. If HR really is unloved, it is usually because line managers see them as hindering rather than helping them to achieve their goals. What the HR adviser offers as ‘good professional advice’ (e.g. if you do that we’ll end up in a tribunal) is often perceived by the impatient line manager as stopping them doing what they want to do (i.e. firing somebody they want to be rid of). Really effective HR, though, is about ensuring that the organisation develops managers who accept that firing someone (who was apparently good enough when they recruited them) is a failure by the organisation as a whole and can significantly reduce its potential value. High value HR is not about ‘seeking to blame’ or ‘grabbing the credit’ and ‘love’ doesn’t come into it.
No, HR teams that start with evidence (e.g. how well do our people perform now?) and design everything they do with one end in mind – ‘how can we improve their performance?’ -will always find a warm welcome. So how well is HR currently doing by this indicator?
The jury is still out
For as long as I can remember there have always been regular surveys and studies asking the questions – how effective is HR and what impact is it having? No doubt some academic, somewhere, will be keeping track of all of these studies (see http://www.employment-studies.co.uk/pubs/report.php?id=448 for a very recent example) and one day will produce a ‘meta-analysis’ of all of them to produce even more data purporting to add greater illumination to these vexed questions. The simple point they all seem to have missed is that such HR impact surveys are destined to be self-defeating. The very fact that someone is trying to calculate HR’s impact, after the event, is an open admission that no one was clear, at the start, what HR’s value was meant to be.
As far back as 1998, the American HR ‘guru’ Dave Ulrich suggested (A new mandate for Human Resources, HBR, Jan-Feb 1998) that HR should be abolished unless it changed its ways. Yet, almost exactly 10 years later, at PwC\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\'s annual HR conference in Rome, in March 2008, he is still advising that ‘CEOs need help with people issues...’ and admits ‘… The barrier is not line managers - the barrier is us in HR’.
Ulrich still seems to be pointing his finger at HR. In fact, he was responding to yet another survey, one produced by PwC themselves and presented at the same conference, entitled Fit for business: Keeping HR relevant in a changing world, which apparently revealed that just 43 per cent of the 1,150 CEOs surveyed were satisfied with the ability of their HR department to compete for talent.
Now, to anyone who holds a negative opinion as to what HR can offer, this is only serving to reinforce their already, jaundiced perspective. However, to a high-value HR professional it is much more serious than that because they view it, quite rightly, as an issue for the CEOs themselves. For example, did the 57 per cent dissatisfied CEOs have any hard evidence on which to base their views? Could it be that the same CEOs were constraining costs at the same time as trying to attract talent? Do CEOs offer the sort of clear vision and exemplary leadership that might attract talent? Does the best talent in the organisation get recognised or does the CEO favour his/her own clique of blue-eyed boys? These would have made for very revealing survey questions, but often the toughest questions are never asked of the right people. It is a great deal easier just to lay the blame at the door of HR.
The only evidence that counts is value
One commentator on this, Stephen Battalia, head of Team HR at foods manufacturer Nestlé UK, put his finger right on the button when he said: ‘It\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\'s really important that HR teams have that discussion with their chief executives, about what value they add to profits and turnover.’ Surely that, in the final analysis, is all that matters. If CEOs and HR are not discussing issues such as talent management in terms of measurable profit and organisational value, then any attempts at ‘talent management’ will be just faddish hype or another case of jumping on the latest HR bandwagon.
Once the executive adopts a simple principle, and that is: no HR activity (including learning and development) should be sanctioned without a clear line of sight to the organisation’s measurable business objectives, progress can be made. So what does this look like in practice? Take any talent management programme and ask the question, if this works where will we see the results appearing? More importantly, if it doesn’t work what damage will we have to expect? These are the tough questions that rarely get asked and, even if they do, by highly competent, business focused HR people, the CEO often does not want to accept that they have to walk the talk. Such CEOs give only lip service to activity-based development programmes and then are the first to say they are dissatisfied with HR’s efforts when no improvements are forthcoming.
The future is Evidence-Based HR Management
This call for better evidence is not an attempt to turn people management into a science though. After 30 years in the game, I would take some convincing that HR is ever going to be anything other than a mixture of art and science but whatever methods are chosen they have to be backed up with evidence. The theories espoused by the psychometric testers, 360° feedback exponents and competence framework proponents are the ones who have so far failed to convince CEOs about their value, simply because they were driven by a doctrine focused on the process rather than a measurable business improvement. Having tangible evidence alongside the art is what makes the future of HR look so rosy.
Most organisations these days say that employee engagement is crucial to their ability to perform but ask them to show the evidence of this and they will usually refer to an ‘academic’ study (as Ulrich did in his 1998 article). But referring to an abstract is not meaningful evidence for a CEO. Evidence-Based HR Management has to mean evidence that is directly drawn from your own organisation and is shown to work in that context.
If HR begins by asking its CEO evidence-based questions, and ensures they are as much part of the HR solution as the HR team, they will never again have to wait to see what their CEO thinks about them in a survey. It will be obvious to everyone involved right from the start.
©Paul Kearns, 2008. This article cannot be reproduced without the author’s permission
