“An inflection point for HR?”

As an HR leader, would you be best described as a fire-fighter or an architect?

In this, the first of twelve monthly blogs peering under the bonnet of Next Generation HR, we start where the report starts: have we reached an inflection point for HR?

Pausing briefly only to look up ‘inflection point’, is it fair to say that’s where we are as a profession? In short, is it the case that HR can go either go one way or the other - it can either hit the same lamp-post it hit last Monday, or it can smoothly accelerate away, towards the brighter lights?

As the report states, HR’s direction of travel in many organisations has been determined over the last two years by the recession juggernaut bearing down on its tail. This inevitably means “retrenchment or even survival has dictated many agendas”. On the plus side, there is some evidence of innovation in HR in reaction to the crisis, albeit on a necessarily tactical level. Such innovation, and HR’s capacity to efficiently fight fires, may have won it new friends in some organisations. But once the fires are put out, what should HR be and do next, to retain any new-found respect? Nobody needs fire-fighters once the smoke’s cleared. 

A US report looking at post-recession HR notes that “For … HR professionals, it is crucial that they move beyond instituting short, reactionary changes and examine… [what] … will benefit the business for the long-term. These leaders are expected to drive workforce conversations with their counterparts in other business functions, ask the bigger picture questions” because “companies aren’t going back to their old ways of doing business”.

This is very close to Lee Sears’ point in the report: “Too much of the debate on HR is driven by conversations on structure and roles … rather than asking the more fundamental questions about how it needs to change in light of the new demands on organisations.”

So: everyone expects HR to maintain and improve the house. But increasingly organisations can, and should, expect HR to be building another house altogether, one more adapted to the prevailing climate. One business director quoted in a recent IES report said: “HR’s overall game can be raised – it needs to be more ambitious for the business and offer a vision for how the business could be.”

So that’s the inflection point. Sure, HR needs to be good at the tactics, and be good at reacting – crises are not unknown in organisations, and HR should be a profound and irreplaceable part of their solution. But it shouldn’t be satisfied with that – not when there’s the potential, and the need, for HR to be so much more.    

Next time we’ll look at the first of the key concepts Next Generation HR introduces: that of organisational authenticity. Until then, what are readers’ views of where HR is now – does the summary above resonate with you?  

Richard Goff