Has Ulrich moved HR too far away from the employment relationship?
Friday, 26 February 2010
Jennifer Parkin
Category: The Future of HR
Dave Ulrich wanted to help HR demonstrate its value to business communities and in many organisations he has certainly achieved this (along with some timely cost reductions!). There is also broad recognition that his ideas have advanced discussions about the role of HR, giving the profession fresh ambition: it’s not just about providing a reactive service for when the employment relationship goes wrong, HR must also take a transformational role to underpin sustainable business performance and it does this by aligning with business strategy.
OK, all sounds good so far, but surely the role HR plays in an organisation should also recognise the needs of the employees – after all, ‘strategic and transformational’ interventions are about improving performance through people, aren’t they?
At The Work Foundation we are examining the employment relationship in detail as our starting point for understanding how to improve the quality of people management. At our principal partner exchange forum this week, we framed a discussion about the way HR is typically structured and how this impacts on key players in the employment relationship: leaders and managers; HR practitioners and employees.
By looking at HR structure through this lens, it became apparent that devising the role of HR with business need and HR reputation as a starting point (as Ulrich suggested) has not delivered the whole package. This may be, in part, due to the misinterpretation of Ulrich’s ideas or the convenient enigma surrounding the employee champion role at the point of implementation.
Our forum delegates highlighted three thought-provoking issues with the way HR has evolved to date:
1. The give-take syndrome - in a bid to become more strategic, HR has given back responsibility for people management to the line which has, in some cases, exposed capability issues in line managers. At the same time, the practitioners want to take more responsibility (in partnership of course) for strategic business decisions. But do they really want to be decision makers or do they just want their advice to be heard? From a leadership and management point of view, this has caused no end of confusion as to where business accountability stops and HR accountability starts.
2. HR career fragmentation - the irony that the design of HR functions has not taken into account clear development paths for practitioners e.g. a lack of transition between a shared service centre role and a business partner.
3. The missing listener - it is arguably appropriate that employee welfare services have been removed from the HR remit but by doing so, has the profession lost a valuable insight into the real culture and temperature of an organisation?
As their last point highlights, there is still a very real ‘disconnect’ between strategic decisions and the views of staff in many organisations and if HR is no longer directly listening to employee needs, who is?
