How can we gain more credibility and respect for the HR function at our company?
Question: Many of the business leaders, managers and employees in our organization don’t respect the HR department. They often treat us like we’re a clerical function and have little knowledge beyond hiring, firing, basic personnel administration and recordkeeping. What can we do to raise the profile of the HR department and gain more credibility and respect for the HR function within the company?
Answer: There is no doubt the HR profession suffers from a poor public image these days. Many managers, executives and other business professionals cling to outdated stereotypes about the nature and purpose of the “personnel” function, and many rank-and-file employees and job candidates have misconceptions about the roles and responsibilities of HR practitioners.
Many people immediately think of recruitment when they hear the term “human resources” and assume there is little more to HR than talent acquisition (not to knock recruitment, which is a challenging and respectable endeavour in its own right).
However, they don’t always realize there is far more to the HR function than recruitment and they may be unaware of the types of programs HR practitioners are involved in and the value HR can bring to the table.
Many employees take the view that HR practitioners are highly paid, privileged gatekeepers or they can’t be trusted with confidential information and will always take the employer’s side.
Dispelling negative stereotypes
HR practitioners can help dispel the negative stereotypes about the profession through education, improved communications and service delivery, and marketing and public relations initiatives — both within organizations and in the broader business community and society as a whole.
It is also vitally important to ensure the HR function is truly adding value and contributing to the bottom line and business results, while acquiring, empowering, engaging, deploying and developing employees.
To do this, HR departments need to ask themselves some tough questions to truly determine whether or not they are adding sufficient value to the organization. This can be done through the development of benchmarking and metrics, surveys and internal audits.
It is also important to establish open and frank two-way communications with internal clients about what is and isn’t working, and to get out of the office and talk to people throughout the organization. Find out what their issues, challenges and concerns are, and what’s keeping them up at night.
In the case of managers and executives, there is a good chance many of these issues are about people and relate somehow to human capital management and how the organization attracts, retains and manages talent.
To be functioning at a truly strategic level, HR needs to be able to work with line managers and executives to develop solutions to issues relating to management of the organization’s human capital. At its most strategic level, HR should even have input into the organization’s overall corporate strategy.
Becoming more strategic
But constantly prattling on about the need for HR to become “more strategic” won’t necessarily help. That is because people outside the HR function likely won’t care and wouldn’t necessarily want HR to take a more strategic approach.
This is particularly true in an organizational context such as yours. Senior business leaders in your company won’t necessarily buy into the need for HR to be more strategic. Instead, they just want to have their job requisitions filled in a timely manner, their paperwork processed accurately and the training programs they want delivered to employees (and don’t necessarily want to be told when training isn’t the answer to performance issues).
Because of that, the first step in raising the profile of the HR department must be to ensure the activities that “keep the lights on” are done efficiently and effectively. Without getting the basics right first, there is little point in trying to become more strategic or promoting the skills, competencies and capabilities of the HR team within the organization.
Additional suggestions
Here are some additional suggestions for raising the profile of HR:
• Conduct lunch-and-learns about various HR topics and explain to managers and employees who does what within the HR team.
• Communicate to managers and employees what the HR team is working on, and how this work impacts the bottom line.
• Become a centre of expertise for leadership best practices; focus on developing managerial capability within the organization.
• Get involved in cross-functional project teams.
• Adopt more of a coaching and consulting mindset where HR practitioners are more willing to provide recommendations, advice and even pushback to line managers.
• Be prepared to provide metrics and hard numbers relating to the return on investment (ROI) of HR programs; develop business cases to support the retention of specific HR programs in-house.
• Facilitate workshops on trendy and popular business topics such as innovation, design thinking, agile development and social media in the workplace.
• Implement knowledge management solutions and skills inventories within the HR department to track internal knowledge, skills and abilities, and showcase that information to internal clients.
Brian Kreissl is the product development manager for Thomson Reuters Legal Canada’s human resources, OH&S, payroll and records retention products and solutions. He can be reached at [email protected].
