The Shoes of the Shoemaker

It is the old irony of the shoes of the shoemaker. My experience with working with HR teams in assessing their organisations has led to some conclusions as to the underlying reasons for HR's lack of insight into their own internal operational performance and positioning:

• In the industrial mode of development HR took the role of ensuring that people as resources are adequately prepared to be applied as such in the production processes - in the information age the mode of development is knowledge (acting upon knowledge itself - the process of innovation) and so a number of HR organisation are still trying to "satisfy" the operations people with industrial-type "resources" thinking and service delivery;

• As opposed to the operational departments they serve, traditionally HR does not have a well-established culture of customer centrality - in fact some HR people do not see themselves in a service capacity at all - they maintain the "industrial psychology" profile that reinforces a view that they are highly specialised and academically astute people that are somewhat irritated with service demands from the operations managers;

• In some HR organisations, the view is that the risks are too high to let “non-HR specialists” such as production team leaders take responsibility for any HR process or activity. The result is that HR almost always heavily overburdened with demand which it cannot cope with in turn, resulting in negative employee satisfaction as problems / needs are not dealt with professionally;

• The HR organisational structure in some cases still reflects a fragmented or silo-type structure with recruitment “department”, a training unit, the OD “department” and so on. These department very seldom interact with one another, there is no coherent synergy in their service delivery to the customer groups and each has an elaborate costly structure and budget, making it slow and non-responsive as a support organisation;

• HR people are not up to date with the positive impact that a management practice such as Business Process Management could have for their own organisation – again, whilst their customer groups in manufacturing have embraced BPM and continuous improvement programmes such as Six Sigma a long time ago,  HR is still today slow to adopt to BPM – and they pay the price in respect of the quality of their service delivery;

• Information systems or applications create a lot of discomfort for HR people. I have found myself numerous times trying to create some level of professional co-operation and productive collaboration between the HR and the IT teams. They are often at each others throats, blaming one another for the lack of validated HR data & information. HR often does not take accountability for their information system nor the quality of their data & Information, resulting in endless business blueprint scope changes that result in non-standard and ill-disciplined system behaviour;

• Lack of knowledge and experience with the interface between people, processes and systems within the HR skills set makes it very difficult for them to plan and execute the transformation of their own operations into a fully integrated HR service delivery organisation.

HR Transformation cannot be successful without an integrated view of the totality of the HR organisation before, during and after the transformation project. It simply has to adapt to its own specific domain architecture (the Human Capital Architecture) as a precursor on its journey to become an agile and business-focused embedded support organisation.