Thursday, February 10, 2005
It's Time
HR-evolution or revolution? It’s time. Evolution takes a long time. Revolution? Not so much.
We work in interesting times. With changes in labor supply, automation, and outsourcing coming, there are many crossroads ahead. As HR professionals, we’re facing new pressures and are uniquely unequipped to comply with normal business practices - like measurement. Funny, since compliance is supposed to be a big deal to us. Change is happening, but is it happening to us, or are we doing it?
I want to speak to the importance of HR. I want to speak of the folly of HR. As HR professionals, we’re in the ‘employee’ business. We are also employees. We should be able to bridge the gap between employer and employee – we live it. We need to manage ourselves like a line business, not a bureaucracy. We need to marry the ‘human’ to the ‘resources’. We’re doing a lousy job with both.
Automating a recruiting process is evolution. Outsourcing HR is revolution. Questioning the assumptions underlying a process before automating (so we don’t automate bad processes) is proactive revolution. We have lots of little choices every day - the mental equivalent of busywork. We have one big choice: evolve or be overthrown revolution-style. HR, change thyself.
HR-evolution or revolution? You decide.
We work in interesting times. With changes in labor supply, automation, and outsourcing coming, there are many crossroads ahead. As HR professionals, we’re facing new pressures and are uniquely unequipped to comply with normal business practices - like measurement. Funny, since compliance is supposed to be a big deal to us. Change is happening, but is it happening to us, or are we doing it?
I want to speak to the importance of HR. I want to speak of the folly of HR. As HR professionals, we’re in the ‘employee’ business. We are also employees. We should be able to bridge the gap between employer and employee – we live it. We need to manage ourselves like a line business, not a bureaucracy. We need to marry the ‘human’ to the ‘resources’. We’re doing a lousy job with both.
Automating a recruiting process is evolution. Outsourcing HR is revolution. Questioning the assumptions underlying a process before automating (so we don’t automate bad processes) is proactive revolution. We have lots of little choices every day - the mental equivalent of busywork. We have one big choice: evolve or be overthrown revolution-style. HR, change thyself.
HR-evolution or revolution? You decide.
