Mired in a deep funk, HR has its work cut out for it

As I speak to groups of businesspeople, I sometimes ask, "Who here is in HR?" No hands. If I then say, in amazement, "No one is in HR?" a hand or two reluctantly sneaks up, maybe halfway. That wouldn’t be remarkable, except that I usually learn later that 20 percent or 30 percent of the people are in human resources. This epidemic of hand shyness doesn’t happen with marketing or accounting or engineering or MIS, just HR.

Dale Dauten, King Features Syndicate

What has happened to this noble profession? The people who used to see themselves as Keepers of the Morale suddenly have lost theirs.

In every recession, it stinks to be a staff person, but HR seems to be in a deeper funk than any of the other professions. Perhaps that’s because HR missed out on the last boom. Even in good times, if you get called into your boss’ office and hear, "I’ve asked HR to sit in on our discussion," how do you feel? You feel that the sweet chariot of your career is swinging low.

So what happened? Well, just as decades ago the federal government decided that businesses could be its tax collectors, so government discovered that it could require businesses to enforce public policy. Everything from discrimination to reducing traffic has become the responsibility of business. And many of the trickiest enforcement issues fell to the beleaguered folks in HR.

Jack Welch, America’s most famous former executive not in prison, spoke in May to the Society for Human Resource Management convention in Mexico City. Welch had his own hand-raising experience. According to a report on the society’s Web site (www.shrm.org), Welch asked the 2,000 attendees for a show of hands in response to being asked how many of them thought the head of HR was perceived as being as important as the company’s chief financial officer. When just a few hands went up, Welch barked, "That’s shocking. What the hell’s wrong?"

I wonder how many of the HR people were mentally sighing, "He shouldn’t use the H-word–that could come back to haunt him"? Not as many, I bet, as were thinking, "You call that `shocking,’ pal? Where have you been the past couple of decades?" And I wonder how many were thinking, "CEOs like Jack Welch are what the hell is wrong."

Welch offered a solution: "If you let your organization put you in a pigeonhole, such as doing benefits all day, shame on you. You’ve got to put yourself in the middle of the action."

Welch has a point. You can’t sit back and wait for CEOs to tell you to make yourself important–you have to go and do it. Of course, that takes people, which takes budget, which takes a different attitude from upper management. In other words, you’re circling the staff lot, and there’s no place to park.

One solution comes from the folks at The Container Store. They realized that HR was so deep into the swamp of problem employees and government compliance that HR employees couldn’t devote themselves to the one thing that would return HR to being a vital contributor: finding, hiring and keeping star employees. So The Container Store created a separate hiring department. This makes sense when you realize that the president, Kip Tindell, really means it when he speaks lovingly of the company’s "Foundation Principle" that goes: "One great employee is worth three good employees." He also told me that "At this point, if we tried to hire someone who was not conspicuously great, there would be a revolt."

Conspicuously great. Now there’s an assignment–to be in charge of achieving conspicuous greatness–and there’s a department anyone would be proud to be a part of, right? Let’s see a show of hands.

Copyright © 2002, Chicago Tribune

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