What's your vision of the HR role? Please vote in my poll. You can select multiple answers in this week's poll. Like my suggestions - or not - please comment.
Discussion in recent years about the role of Human Resources in today's organizations rages on. Over the years of writing this site, I have heard about almost every possible iteration of the role.
From traditional personnel and administrative functions to major company executive committee members, HR serves many and divergent roles.
The challenge is always to provide seamless administrative functions such as benefits enrollment and changes while having the time and energy to do the equally important, but more time and thought consuming, strategic tasks.
Too many people in HR and management roles are hung up in the administrative aspects of the business while the more challenging, and one might argue, more important aspects of the business, are given short shrift.
Many reasons exist: busy work tasks are important and urgent versus tasks that require thought and planning are important but not urgent. An immediate employee need usually trumps longer term planning, too.
A site visitor wrote an article with her ideas for how HR can reinvent itself from the classroom to the boardroom and I wonder how your voting will bolster these thoughts?
If you have roles I missed, that you believe deserve mention, please post your comments.
More Reading About the HR Role
I just joined a company where my title of Training Manager was deliberately kept away from the Human Resources umbrella. I am, by all definitions, “an independent consultant” for all of the departments, managers, and employees. Although I, at first, found my disconnection from the HR department strange, I soon came to understand. The HR department at our organization is known as a “firing squad”. Rather than train the managers on how to coach the employees and effectively document negative behavior, the HR department simply comes in and terminates. I am shocked and saddened by this action, but I am hopeful because our leadership has listened when I have spoken about what a true HR department does. This is my definition: An HR department is the face of the organization. It abides, first and foremost, to the rules of integrity. The goal of HR should be to develop the actual people within the organization and protect the company’s reputation by hiring people who enhance the culture of the organization and terminating those individuals who compromise the organization’s image. Human Resources should serve and protect the company, the employees, and ultimately, the community in which it resides.
I am absolutely agree with you. Today most companies think everything depends on money.